• by Ken Liebeskind , October 17, 2001

NBC and CBS stayed on top of the heap in last week's Nielsen ratings, with NBC winning six of the top 10 shows and CBS the other four. CNN returned to the top of the cable ratings, winning seven of the top 10 slots with America Strikes Back.

Friends, West Wing, E.R. and Law and Order led the way for NBC, winning shares from 24 to 26 and household ratings from 14.4 to 17.9. CBS's Everybody Loves Raymond, CSI and Survivor: Africa followed, with shares of 18 to 24 and household ratings from 13.2 to 14.1. Will & Grace and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (NBC) and Becker (CBS) rounded out the top 10.

A CBS spokeswoman says the network is thrilled with the results of Survivor, which while ranked seventh overall actually had the second highest number of total viewers. The start of the show was bumped 45 minutes by Pres. Bush's press conference. When asked to compare the rating to previous ratings for Survivor premieres, she says it's impossible because "the landscape was different for each one." This is the first time the show premiered in the fall and a past premiere followed the Super Bowl. The high rating is "a good sign that all those proclamations that reality TV is dead are premature," she says. Survivor, however, was the only reality show on the top 25 list, which doesn't bode well for the genre overall.

The top cable show was NFL regular season football on ESPN, with a 5 household share. WWF Entertainment on TNN won the third and sixth spots. All the rest of the top 10 spots went to America Strikes Back, CNN's Sunday daytime coverage of the terrorist attacks. (The cable listings were for the week of Oct. 1-7, one week behind the broadcast listings of Oct. 8-14.)

NBC edged CBS in the prime average rating. Both had 14 shares with NBC's household rating of 8.8 slightly higher than CBS's 8.6. ABC followed with 11/6.7, Fox 9/5.3, UPN 5/3.0 and WB 4/2.9.