"Desperate" for a Fresh Start

[stu]

By Joal Ryan

Mon Sep 25, 7:59 PM ET

 

 

 

All in all, Desperate Housewives is in better shape than Mike the comatose plumber.

 

The campy ABC soap faced down Sunday night football and won, albeit with numbers that were not as strong as those of Grey's Anatomy's present or Desperate Housewives' own past.

 

 

An estimated 23.9 million tuned in Housewives' third-season premiere, per Nielsen Media Research statistics. No other Sunday night show drew as big an audience--not NBC's Sunday Night Football (estimated 15.6 million), not CBS' Without a Trace (estimated 17.4 million).

 

 

But when the latest weekly rankings come out Tuesday, it should be Grey's Anatomy, not Desperate Housewives, that comes out on top. Wisteria Lane's old Sunday neighbor killed on Thursday with 25.4 million viewers, more than even CBS' CSI (22.6 million).

 

 

Desperate Housewives, meanwhile, must make do with good buzz for its third-season storylines, and forget that its maligned second-season storylines scared off millions, from 28.4 million for last September's first episode to 24.2 million for last May's finale.

 

 

All told, Sunday's Housewives, featuring Mike's coma and Bree's sexual awakening, drew nearly 1.8 million more viewers than last season's average.

 

 

The win came as Housewives, in some parts of the country, aired its first new episode opposite a Sunday Night Football game.

 

 

Compared to last season's week-three Monday Night Football game on ABC, Sunday's week-three Sunday Night Football game on NBC was up 15 percent in viewers. Compared to last season's premiere, Housewives was down 16 percent. And while the stats do give pause, it seems too early to say if Housewives was off because of football, or because of its aforementioned suckage problem.

 

 

Elsewhere on Sunday, TV's biggest night after Thursday, the new ABC show Brothers & Sisters (estimated 16.1 million) lost more than a third of Housewives' audience, but managed to make things uncomfortable for CBS' Without a Trace.

 

 

Making its debut in the 10 p.m. Sunday hour, Without a Trace was down 17 percent from its second-season premiere. Last season, the crime show aired on Thursdays where it was the whipped cream on a venti-sized CSI. Now it's the cup for a tall-sized Cold Case (estimated 15.9 million).

 

 

Overall on Sunday, ABC "delivered a dominant first-place finish," but failed to impress CBS, which insisted it "opened in impressive fashion."

 

 

The numbers say ABC was the most watched network of the night, followed by CBS. Football or no, NBC finished third, according to Variety, followed by Fox and the rerun zone that was the CW.