Olympics No Match for Medal-Grinding 'Idol'
Thursday, February 16, 2006; Page C07
"American Idol" continues its scorched-earth campaign to cleanse the television landscape of programming we hold sacred. On Tuesday night it made hash out of the Winter Olympics in their first face-off -- just six days after "Idol" reduced the Grammy Awards to ratings rubble.
Between 8 and 9 p.m., when the tape-delayed, mostly men's figure skating Games coverage was holding the interest of about 16 million viewers, "Idol" was amusing nearly 27 million by dashing the dreams of roomfuls of Ashlee and Usher wannabes.
  Judges Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson compare notes as "American Idol" basks in ratings glory, having crushed the Olympics. (Fox) |
Among the 18-to-49-year-olds that NBC targets, "Idol" more than doubled the ratings of the Games.
Hopefully, the bright young future stars of Fox's "Skating With the Celebrities" competing at the Games in You-Say-Torino-and-I-Say-Turin have not yet received word of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, lest it put them off their game.
NBC's migraine continued at 9 when the Games snagged only about 1.7 million more viewers than Fox's doc drama "House" -- during which, coincidentally, Dr. House learned LSD is a great way to stop that migraine cold. And "House" anesthetized the Games among those younger viewers.
Even though NBC's coverage featured the first U.S. gold medal victory in alpine skiing in a decade, the network was left with the least watched prime-time broadcast of a Winter Olympics since at least 1988 and possibly ever.
And despite NBC's ooh-Bode Miller-ing and golly-Shaun White-ing, the network had by Wednesday morning lost two of the past three nights among the 18-to-49-year-olds it targets -- and could very well have lost last night as well, what with Fox airing another hour of "American Idol" and ABC showing "Lost."
NBC noted yesterday that earlier Games, including Nagano, Albertville, Calgary, Barcelona and Seoul, had all been beaten by programming on competitors' prime-time lineups on several occasions.
Plus, the network added, its broadcast of the Salt Lake City Games had not faced a single Top 10 show on another network, and during the Nagano Games, the highest-ranked show that faced the Games was "Home Improvement" at No. 10. In Torino, however, six of the Top 10 shows face the Games with original episodes and they're all shows that are really on the rise, including both editions of "Idol," ABC's "Desperate Housewives," "Grey's Anatomy" and "Dancing With the Stars."
Which, as near as we can tell, is NBC saying, "The other networks have good shows that they feel confident can take us on -- and they're right."
