• by Wayne Friedman , September 24, 2013

The first official Nielsen rating night of the new TV season belonged to NBC -- as expected.

Its powerful “The Voice” easily dominated all broadcast prime-time programming with a Nielsen preliminary 4.9 rating/13 share for its two-hour opening -- up 14% versus last fall’s 4.2 rating number and 2% higher than last spring’s edition of the show. All this gave a strong lead-in for NBC’s new show starring James Spader, “The Blacklist,” which at 10 p.m. was the next-highest-rated show with a 3.8/10.

But CBS didn’t shy away from the fight. A special one-hour “How I Met Your Mother” got to a 3.6/10 -- the same numbers it had for its year-ago season premiere.

CBS’s “2 Broke Girls” couldn’t keep pace, however -- with “Mother” at a 2.8/7, down almost a full rating point from last year’s start. At 10 p.m., a new limited-series drama “Hostages” earned a 1.8/5 -- the same number that “Hawaii Five-0” earned in the time period a year ago.

In the face of strong competition, ABC’s second week of  “Dancing With the Stars” was down 26% to a 2.3/6. At 10 p.m., it started up another season of “Castle," which took in a similar 2.2/6 -- about where it was at the start a year ago.

Fox’s strong new drama “Sleepy Hollow” stayed that way at 9 p.m.-- at a 3.1/8, down from a 3.5 rating for its premiere a week before. Earlier in the evening, “Bones” slipped almost half a rating point to a 1.9/5.

For the night, NBC averaged a 4.6 rating/12 share among 18-49 viewers (13.98 million overall viewers), followed by CBS at a 2.7/7 (8.39 million viewers), Fox with a 2.5/7 (7.61 million), ABC at a 2.3/6 (12.74 million), Univision with a 1.3/3 (3.38 million); and CW at a 0.2/1 (726,000).

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