3 nights of `Idol' beat 1 Oscars night

The math is simple: three nights of "American Idol" beats one night of the Academy Awards.

Fox dominated the television ratings again behind its hit competition, which was seen by roughly 29 million people on both Tuesday and Wednesday last week. A special Thursday edition had more than 23 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Meanwhile, ABC didn't get quite the usual boost from the Academy Awards. The 32 million people who watched Sunday's show was the smallest Oscars audience since Nielsen began keeping those records in 1974.

The traditional Barbara Walters interview special had fewer than 12 million viewers, Nielsen said.

The cable network Spike counterprogrammed the Oscars with an original Steven Seagal movie, "Urban Justice." Its 1.7 million viewers, mostly men, represented Spike's biggest audience for an original movie.

ABC, which finished second in the ratings behind Fox last week, may have done better if not for the horrid performance of some of its new original shows. "October Road," "Cashmere Mafia" and "Carpoolers" each got fewer than 5 million viewers — or fewer than Univision's audience for the telenovela "Al Diablo Con Guapos" on four separate nights.

Fox averaged 15 million prime-time viewers last week (8.6 rating, 14 share), while ABC had 9.9 million (6.1, 10). CBS had 7.9 million (5.1, 8), NBC 7.2 million (4.6, 7), the CW 2.4 million (1.6, 2), My Network TV 1.2 million (0.8, 1) and ION Television 530,000 (0.4, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision averaged 3.9 million (1.9 rating, 3 share), Telemundo had 1.2 million (0.6, 1), TeleFutura 690,000 (0.4, 1) and Azteca 150,000 (0.1, 0).

NBC's "Nightly News" won the evening news ratings race, averaging 9.6 million viewers (6.5 rating, 12 share). ABC's "World News" had 9.2 million viewers (6.2, 12) and the "CBS Evening News" 7.1 million (4.7, 9).

A ratings point represents 1,128,000 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 Feb. 18-24, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: "Academy Awards," ABC, 32.01 million; "American Idol" (Tuesday), Fox, 29.01 million; "American Idol" (Wednesday), Fox, 28.89 million; "American Idol" (Thursday), Fox, 23.37 million; "Oscar's Red Carpet 2008," ABC, 21.54 million; "Deal or No Deal" (Monday), NBC, 16.95 million; "Lost," ABC, 13.65 million; "Survivor: Micronesia," CBS, 12.66 million; "Two and a Half Men," CBS, 12.45 million; "Don't Forget the Lyrics," Fox, 12.43 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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