Season Is a Success for Everyone Except NBC

Ahumdinger TV season wrapped Wednesday night, with Fox claiming its first-ever No. 1 finish among the 18- to 49-year-olds advertisers covet, CBS clocking the biggest win in 16 years among viewers of all ages, and ABC rising like a phoenix on the success of three freshman series -- and scripted ones at that.

Only the peacock network had nothing to crow about, having plunged from first place to fourth in the key age bracket that is the basis for sales of all its ad time.

And all that talk about scripted series getting trampled to death in the stampede to find the next reality series hit?

Never mind.

The 2004-05 TV season went out with a bang when the two-hour season finales of Fox's "American Idol" and ABC's "Lost" drew a collective average of 51 million viewers to broadcast television.

The fourth-season "Idol" conclusion, in which Carrie Underwood was named winner of the singing competition, averaged more than 30 million viewers -- up about 1.5 million viewers over last spring's finale.

In the same 8-to-10 p.m. time period, the season's last "Lost" episode logged nearly 21 million viewers. That nearly matched the new hit drama's best number of the season, which it scored for an episode that aired before "Idol" returned to Wednesday nights.

Interestingly, the two highly hyped finales did not cannibalize each other, as some industry navel-gazers had feared. Among all the broadcast networks, viewer levels were up 5 percent Wednesday night week to week.

"We're at the point in the business where on any given night about half of the audience isn't watching [broadcast] network television," Fox's scheduling chief Preston Beckman told The TV Column. "It's not about fighting each other, it's about bringing back that audience with great programming."

Beckman's network slogged through the first half of the TV season in fourth place in the demographic it targets with a slew of failed reality series, including "The Rebel Billionaire," "My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss" and "The Next Great Champ." But it rebounded when "American Idol" came back for its fourth season and "24," which had become a hit following "American Idol" on Tuesdays, returned on Monday night for an all-original run.

In addition to the audience increase for "24" compared with the previous season, thanks in some measure to the non-rerun policy, Fox resuscitated its new drama "House" and turned it into a bona fide hit with a post-"Idol" time slot. "The O.C.," which also enjoyed a post-"Idol" run last season on Wednesday nights, this season moved out to establish a toehold for Fox on Thursday -- "a night where we typically got slammed," said the network's new entertainment chief, Peter Liguori.

And, thanks to a post-"Idol" run, "Stacked," starring Pamela Anderson as a bookstore salesclerk whose clothes have all shrunk, is the No. 1 new sitcom of the season among young adults, bumping NBC's "Joey."