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Springtime and competition wilt ratings for CBS Monday comedies

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NEW YORK, N.Y. – CBS’s Monday comedy lineup remains television’s most popular, but the competition for time this spring has taken a bite out of its audience.

“Two and a Half Men” recorded its smallest audience of the season last week, just over 10 million viewers, the Nielsen Co. said. Ashton Kutcher has generally kept the show humming commercially as Charlie Sheen’s replacement, but last Monday’s audience compared unfavourably with its season average of 15.4 million viewers.

The other comedies — “Mike & Molly,” ”2 Broke Girls,” and “How I Met Your Mother” — were both about 2 million off their season averages this week.

Daylight saving time tends to cut into viewership this time of year. The comedies also face tougher fights from the competition shows that are nearing the climax of their seasons; ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” and NBC’s “The Voice” had larger audiences than any of the NBC comedies last week.

ABC’s new comedy, “Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23,” debuted to just under 7 million viewers, losing more than 3 million of the people who watched “Modern Family” ahead of it last Wednesday.

For one last time, Mike Wallace led “60 Minutes” into Nielsen’s top 10 for the week. An estimated 11 million people watched the newsmagazine’s tribute to the veteran correspondent, who died April 7.

For the week, CBS averaged 9.2 million viewers in prime time (5.8 rating, 10 share). Fox had 7.5 million (4.6, 8), ABC had 7.3 million (4.8, 8), NBC had 5.3 million (3.4, 6), ION Television had 1 million and the CW had 970,000 (both 0.7, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision led with a 3.7 million viewership average (1.9, 3). Telemundo had 1.1 million (0.6, 1), TeleFutura had 670,000 (0.4, 1), Estrella had 210,000 and Azteca had 160,000 (both 0.1, 0).

NBC’s “Nightly News” topped the evening newscasts with an average of 8.2 million viewers (5.5, 11). ABC’s “World News” was second with 7.2 million (4.9, 10), and the “CBS Evening News” had 5.9 million viewers (4.0, 8).

A ratings point represents 1,147,000 households, or 1 per cent of the nation’s estimated 114.7 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of April 9-15, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: “NCIS,” CBS, 17.66 million viewers; “American Idol” (Wednesday), Fox, 16.81 million; “Dancing With the Stars,” ABC, 16.39 million; “American Idol” (Thursday), Fox, 15.81 million; “Dancing With the Stars Results,” ABC, 13.39 million; “NCIS: Los Angeles,” CBS, 12.86 million; “Criminal Minds,” CBS, 11.81 million; “60 Minutes,” CBS, 11.03 million; “The Voice,” NBC, 10.52 million; “Two and a Half Men,” CBS, 10.4 million.

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ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is owned by CBS Corp. CW is a joint venture of Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS Corp. Fox and My Network TV are units of News Corp. NBC and Telemundo are owned by Comcast Corp. ION Television is owned by ION Media Networks. TeleFutura is a division of Univision. Azteca America is a wholly owned subsidiary of TV Azteca S.A. de C.V.

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