Survivor: The Australian Outback" won the most viewers last week despite narrowly losing to "ER" in household ratings.
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Nielsen Media Research said "ER" drew a 17.9 household rating which counts the number of television sets tuned to a given program. The number was 17.4 for "Survivor." However, 2.5 million fewer people actually watched "ER." A total of 29 million people saw "Survivor," Nielsen said.
Nielsen explains the discrepancy by saying more people gather around the average TV set at 8 p.m. EST, when CBS's "Survivor" airs, than are watching when NBC's drama begins two hours later.
CBS's sequel to last summer's smash hit shoved its primary competition, NBC's "Friends," down to third place in the weekly rankings, Nielsen said.
The full top ten list:
Top 10 shows, their networks and ratings for the week of January 29-February 4:
1. "ER" NBC, 17.9
2. "Survivor II" CBS, 17.3
3. "Friends" NBC, 14.2
4. "CSI" CBS, 14.0
5. "Everybody Loves Raymond" CBS, 13.9
6. "Who Wants to be a Millionaire-Wednesday" ABC, 13.4
7. "Will & Grace" NBC, 12.6
8. "Who Wants to be a Millionaire-Sunday" ABC, 12.4
9. "SNL Primetime Extra" NBC, 12.4
10. "The Practice" ABC, 12.1
Anyone else consider the bigger surprise to be that Survivor has also been enough to push CSI all the way up to #4 -- wow.
Source: CNN