• by Wayne Friedman , March 5, 2010

NBC long Thursday-night doldrums just got a decent surprise: "The Office" won its first 9 p.m. time period over ABC's "Grey's Anatomy."

The NBC sitcom's numbers have been slowing building to this point for some time -- helped in no small part by some extra Winter Olympic promotion last week.

A special hour of "The Office" tallied a Nielsen 4.7 rating/12 share among 18-49 viewers, with originals from "Grey's Anatomy" (a 4.0/10) and CBS' "CSI" (3.7/10) trailing.

This also lifted NBC's "The Marriage Ref" (3.7/10) up over CBS' "The Mentalist" (3.3/9) and ABC's "Private Practice" (2.9/8). "Ref" was down from its special Sunday-night debut, which earned a big 4.8 rating.

Both NBC's earlier evening sitcoms -- "Community" (2.3/7) and "Parks & Recreation" (2.3/6) also were its best results this season. Still, this only gave NBC a third-place finish on the night, a 3.5/10.

Fox, using another special Thursday edition of "American Idol", upset everyone's programming cart. It had night-leading 6.5/19 -- although down 8% from the week before. "Kitchen Nightmares" at 9 p.m. for Fox earned a respectable 3.1/8 following "Idol." Fox ended the night in first place with a 4.9/13 among 18-49 viewers.

ABC's only silver lining on the evening was that "Grey"'s was off its series low of a week ago, improving 8% -- in part because of the absence of the big Olympic programming. ABC was in a distant fourth place for the night, at a 2.6/7.

With the Olympics over, CBS saw "Survivor: Heroes versus Villains" gain -- up a bit to a 3.8/11, coming in at second place in the time period versus "Idol." All this helped CBS to a second-place finish on the night: a 3.6/10.

Univision was farther back at 1.5/4; CW was behind about half of Univision's numbers, at 0.7/2, running repeats of "The Vampire Diaries" and "Supernatural."