The premiere of Survivor's controversial race between ethnically divided teams on drew some major sampling to CBS, recording a 6.6 rating/20 share in the key 18-49 demo Thursday night in Nielsen overnight ratings.
It was the night's top show and powered the net to an easy win on the night with a 5.3/16. CBS also had the second-highest-rated show, a repeat of CSI at a 4.8/14. It also had the third-highest-rated show, yet another CSI repeat, with a 4.7/14.
That's the good news. The bad is that is was still down 10% and 5%, respectively, from the previous two Survivor debut,s and was not going up against new shows, as it will be next week.
In distant second was ABC with a 3/9 for back-to-back repeats of Grey's Anatomy and a new Prime Time. Fox was third with a 2.2/7 for its all-new lineups. There were no ratings to write home about from Til Death, Happy Hour and Celebrity Duets, the last which came in fourth at 9-10 behind repeats on the other Big Three nets. NBC was fourth for the night with a 2.1/6 with repeats of Office, Earl and ER.
The WB still had more than a million people tuning in and a .7/2 rating in the demo as it heads for the exit.--Ben Grossman contributed to this report.
