Weekly Cable Ratings- Disney Takes Top Honors
by Anne Becker -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/26/2007 9:35:00 AM
Buoyed by its most-viewed day ever on June 22, Disney Channel topped the cable rankers for the week ending June 24, with an average 3.13 million total viewers in prime, according to Nielsen Media Research. Non-ad-supported Disney scored on Friday with the TV premiere of Spy Kids 3D: Game Over and a marathon of its original series Hannah Montana. A new episode, June 24 at 8:30 p.m., averaged a huge 7.38 million total viewers, making it the week's second most-viewed cable program.
While TNT's record-breaking season three premiere of The Closer was the week's most-viewed program (8.81 million viewers June 18 at 9 p.m.), USA Network took second to Disney for the week overall with an average 2.66 million viewers in prime.
USA was helped, per usual, by strong performances from Monday night wrestling programming as well as weekend showings of The Pacifier. Its Starter Wife original series continues to post good, if dropping, numbers - 2.8 million viewers for the June 21 installment vs. 3.6 million, 3.9 million and 5.4 million in the three weeks prior.
TNT ranked third for the week with an average 2.5 million total viewers in prime. In addition to The Closer's premiere, TNT saw a boost from NASCAR racing on Sunday, the week's third most-viewed program with 6.52 million total viewers.
It was followed for the week by TBS with an average 1.93 million viewers in prime and Fox News with 1.65 million.Lifetime, whose June 24 episode of Army Wives drew 50,000 more viewers than the week before (3.89 million) ranked sixth for the week with 1.64 million.
Sci Fi, tenth in prime for the week, saw strong numbers for the June 22 finale of its Stargate SG-1 series. Of the 8 p.m. episode's average 2.25 million total viewers, 1.1 million of them were adults 18-49, which beat all other cable networks in the demo that hour. Spike also had reason to crow for the week - its June 23 season five finale of Ultimate Fighter outdrew all other broadcast and cable programming with men 18-34 (834,000) and men 18-49 (1.4 million).
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