Although it ranked a more modest seventeenth in the week's viewership rankings with 8.9 million viewers, last week's premiere of NBC's Hit Me Baby One More Time reality performance show topped the ratings for the week ending June 5 in one key ranking -- the Adults 18-49 demographic.
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NBC's Thursday, June 2 premiere of Hit Me Baby One More Time delivered a 4.7/13 rating/share in the Adults 18-49 demographic favored by advertisers, a performance that ranked it at the top of the summer week's Adults 18-49 rankings and gave it the highest Adults 18-49 debut rating for a new unscripted summer series since Fox's June 3, 2003 premiere of American Juniors.
Right behind it on the Adults 18-49 rankings was ABC's Dancing with the Stars, which scored a 4.3/12 rating/share and ranked second in the mostly repeat-filled early summer programming week. The situation was flipped in the viewership rankings, where while Hit Me only ranked seventeenth, the 13.5 million viewers drawn to ABC's Dancing premiere ranked it second to only a CBS CSI repeat (14.2 million) in the week's rankings.
Both shows also performed well in the week's Adults 25-54 demographic rankings, with Dancing with the Stars ranking third and Hit Me Baby One More Time placing fourth (trailing only CBS's CSI and its CSI: Miami spinoff.)
The week's Top 20 rankings also featured a third newly debuting summer reality series -- Fox's Hell's Kitchen. While the 6.8 million viewers drawn to Hell's Kitchen's Monday, May 30 Memorial Day weekend premiere weren't enough to rank it in the week's Top 20 viewership rankings, it did place among the week's Adults 18-49 and Adults 25-54 rankings, placing ninth in Adults 18-49 and tying for twentieth in Adults 25-54.