Last nights big winner of the AMERICAN MUSIC AWARDS was the show itself and music was certainly in the air for ABC who walked away with the top spot of the 8 o'clock hour, but was not able to bring down the HOUSE, which beat out the AMAs for leading show at 9 o'clock and helped secure second place of the night for the FOX network. It seems 2 1/2 hours of AMA goodness was plenty for most of America when, despite regaining the top spot at 10, the awards show lost a large percentage of its viewers at 10:30 to a new episode of LAW & ORDER: SVU, proving the only thing that can really help bring you down from a Jimmy Kimmel high is a friendly dose of rape stories. Despite the solid SVU showing at 10 and 10:30, NBC was so brutalized by the Tony Bennet music special (which was actually fantastic), that it floundered to fourth place on the night and let CBS sneak into the bronze. Sorry CW, always the bridesmaid for you.
For the complete listing of last nights Nielsen ratings (18-49) stick round after the jump . . .
How do I read these ratings?
A Nielsen rating may look like this:
8pm - NBC - TVgasm The TV Show - 10.0/18
Focus on the 10.0/18. The RATING, 10.0, on the left represents the actual number of households that watched a show. One rating point equals 1,102,000 households. The SHARE, 18, on the right represents the show's proportion of the total households watching television at that time.
For example, TVgasms TV Show has a 10 rating/18 share. That means 11,020,000 households are tuned in to the show and 18% of all the households with a TV turned on are watching that show.
Ratings and Share are customarily broken down for various DEMOs -- a demographic grouping of viewers, like 18-49 adults or 2-12 children or 18-34 women, etc. Advertisers, and therefore networks, covet the 18-49 adult demo, and so tend to concentrate on that number.
Due to the Thanksgiving weekend, ratings for the remainder of the week may be delayed.