An unexpected boost from Mel Gibson and Steven Seagal helped TBS claim the cable ratings crown for November, while the news networks saw their numbers slip as post-Sept. 11 audiences sought less war coverage and more entertainment and football.
With Gibson's Lethal Weapon 4 and Seagal's Fire Down Below blasting their way to lofty positions in the Nielsen rankings with 5.0 (Lethal Weapon 4) and 4.1 (Fire Down Below) household ratings, TBS managed to nudge Lifetime from the top spot, averaging a 2.0 prime-time rating, or 1.7 million households for the month; Lifetime ended the month with a 1.9 rating, an average of 1.6 million homes.
Nonetheless, Lifetime is still on track to finish the year on top, with an average 2.0 rating year-to-date, while Cartoon Network, USA Network and TBS find themselves following, at 1.7. Even more auspicious for Lifetime was the fact that its household numbers jumped 26% as compared with those of November 2000.
ESPN, which averaged a 1.8 rating, or 1.5 million homes, finished third in the month. The sports network's performance was buoyed by the customarily strong showing by its Sunday Night Football franchise; the three games aired over the last three Sundays of the month each raked in more than 10 million households, ending up as the three most-watched programs of November. Still, ESPN's rating was off 10% from last year.
USA followed ESPN, with a 1.7 rating (1.4 million households), a 3% leap from a year ago. Nickelodeon, TNT, Cartoon, Fox News, CNN and Discovery rounded out the top ten.
The news networks' audiences lagged somewhat in November as compared to October, when news of the terrorist attacks and the then-fledgling campaign in Afghanistan was still being feverishly disseminated and consumed.
?I think people are kind of sick of news, and now we ? and other networks ? are bouncing back,? said Besty Rella, Lifetime VP-research. She also pointed to the success of the recent CBS Carol Burnett special and observes that Beatle George Harrison's death last week dominated headlines in a way no non-war story has since before Sept. 11.
In October, CNN averaged 1.8 million households, Fox News averaged 1.2 million and MSNBC averaged 772,000, putting them all in the top 11 cable networks for the month. In November, however, CNN's numbers dropped to 1.06 million, Fox's to 948,000 and MSNBC's to 528,000.
A further measure of the public's waning interest in the war on terrorism is that during October, 15 of the 30 highest-rated cable programs were on the news networks, and the rest were either sports or wrestling programs. Only one entertainment program ? the VH1 Concert for New York City ? cracked that list. In November, only seven news programs were among the top 30, and almost all involved breaking-news coverage of the American Airlines crash in Queens, N.Y.
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