'The War' has strong ratings start

A handful of new series got the jump on the fall TV season, none as successfully as Ken Burns' epic miniseries about World War II. The first of the seven parts of "The War" attracted 15.5 million viewers to PBS on Sunday, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Add in a rerun that was telecast immediately after it was done, and an estimated 18.7 million people saw it on Sunday. (The noncommercial Public Broadcasting Service is not included in the weekly ratings.)

That outpaced everything on the commercial broadcast networks all week, except for Sunday night's telecast of the Dallas-Chicago National Football League game on NBC.

CBS' first telecast of the controversial reality show "Kid Nation" was seen by 9.4 million viewers. The Fox debut of the drama "K-Ville" landed just outside Nielsen's top 20 programs for last week with 8.9 million viewers.

They didn't quite match the viewership for the returns of old favorites like "Cold Case," "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons," however. The return "Survivor" _ this one in China _ did best of all, placing No. 2 right behind football.

A new TV season technically began Monday, with most of the new programming to follow.

CBS won the last week of the "old" season by averaging 8.9 million prime-time viewers (5.8 rating, 10 share). NBC had 7.6 million (5.0, 8), Fox 7.4 million (4.7, 8), ABC 5.7 million (3.8, 7), the CW 2.8 million (1.8, 3), My Network TV 900,000 (0.6, 1) and ION Television 540,000 (0.4, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision averaged 3.5 million viewers last week (1.9 rating, 3 share). Telemundo had 980,000 (0.5, 1), TeleFutura 590,000 (0.3, 1) and Azteca 120,000 (0.1, 0).

The evening news ratings race was essentially a dead heat, with ABC's "World News" averaging 7.69 million viewers (5.3 rating, 11 share) and NBC's "Nightly News" 7.66 million (5.3, 12). The "CBS Evening News" averaged 6.1 million (4.2, 9).

A ratings point represents 1,130,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 112.8 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of Sept. 17-23, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: NFL Football: Dallas at Chicago, NBC, 19.05 million; "Survivor: China," CBS, 15.35 million; "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," CBS, 14.07 million; "Sunday Night Pre-Kick Show," NBC, 13.86 million; "Cold Case," CBS, 12.75 million; "Deal or No Deal" (Monday), NBC, 11.72 million; "Shark," CBS, 11.42 million; "60 Minutes," CBS, 11.37 million; "Without a Trace," CBS, 11.28 million; "Two and a Half Men," CBS, 10.84 million.

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ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is a division of CBS Corp. Fox is a unit of News Corp. NBC is owned by General Electric Co. Telemundo is owned by General Electric. TeleFutura is a division of Univision. ION Television is owned by ION Media Networks.

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