'Chris' Takes NBC's Big Piece of Chicken

Against Trump, CBS's "CSI" kicked off its season with about 29 million watching. That's down compared with last year's kickoff crowd of nearly 31 million, but still about as many viewers as all of the show's time slot broadcast competitors combined.

Back to NBC's bad news: At 10 p.m. the 12th-season debut of "ER" posted its smallest audience ever for an original episode -- just under 14.4 million viewers. "ER" was no match for the premiere of CBS's crime drama "Criminal Minds," starring Mandy Patinkin (voice of an angel), which attracted 19.6 million viewers.

"Criminal Minds" did a better job opening in that best-of-all CBS time slots than had "Without a Trace" in 2002. "WOaT" bagged about 16 million viewers off of a 30 million "CSI" lead-in audience that fall.

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The 2005-06 TV season officially started on Monday and already it has its first casualty. Fox has yanked its ratings-starved Wednesday drama "Head Cases" and our long -- okay it aired twice -- Adam Goldberg nightmare is over.

Six episodes were shot; if we're lucky we'll never see the other four, saving Chris O'Donnell further embarrassment for having agreed to co-star in the odd-couple lawyer drama with Goldberg, playing a hotshot lawyer who had a breakdown, and a lawyer who should be locked up, respectively.

Fox debuted the series early, so it could gain a toehold before it had to be taken off to make way for the network's big commitment to baseball and the World Series.

Last week, in its second telecast, "Head Cases" attracted only about 3 million viewers; the week previous, it had attracted more than 6 million. That kind of says it all.

Fox says it will plug the hole with the reality series "Nanny 911" for the next two weeks; after that it's baseball and after that, reality series "Trading Spouses" moves in.