A Very Big Deal for Ratings-Challenged NBC

NBC aired the most watched show on television last week, which almost never happens anymore, and the network won the week among younger viewers -- ditto on that.

Here's a look at the week's deals and no deals:

WINNERS

"Deal or No Deal." Howie Mandel and the Briefcase Babes clocked nearly 14 million viewers to top last week's Top 10 list. (This past Monday, the show's season finale logged 18 million viewers, which suggests a possible repeat Top 10 performance.) The last NBC show to rank No. 1 for a week was a "Dateline" during Hurricane Katrina last August.

NBC. The GE-owned network won the week among the 19-to-49-year-olds advertisers pay a premium to reach, thanks to about 10 hours of original programming across the 22-hour prime-time landscape. That included two broadcasts of "Deal or No Deal," "The Apprentice," five hours of "Dateline" and a two-hour season debut of "Last Comic Standing."

"[Media conglomerate] National Spelling Bee." ABC's first prime-time broadcast of the bee scored nearly 9 million viewers, the network's best summer number in the Thursday time slot in four years. The audience grew from just 6.8 million viewers to more than 14 million for the competition's final 11 minutes. Still, the bee was only the No. 7 show for the week among kids, behind two Thursday broadcasts of Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance" and "The Simpsons," NBC's Monday "Deal or No Deal" and ABC's Saturday broadcast of animated flick "Toy Story" and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition."

CBS dramas. Six of the week's top 10 series were CBS dramas because, as CEO Les Moonves pointed out during Upfront Week, they're not serialized and therefore they repeat better.

"Last Comic Standing." Did you ever break up with someone, then regret it and try to pretend it never happened next time you met that person? Me neither. But NBC did, with fans of "Last Comic Standing" last week, when it aired the much-ballyhooed fourth-season debut of the show it had canceled right before the third season's final episode, in which the winner was to be announced. Nearly 8.6 million viewers forgave NBC. While not as big a crowd as the more than 9 million who tuned in to the show's debuts in the summers of '03 and '04, it's still better than the fewer than 8 million who caught the debut of that ill-fated third-season all-star edition.

"The Hills." Nearly 3 million watched the premiere of MTV's series in which we catch our fave "Laguna Beach" alum Lauren Conrad living in L.A., interning at Teen Vogue. "Hills" was Wednesday's most watched telecast among 12-to-24-year-old viewers, the cable network's target audience.

LOSERS

"The 4400 Special: Unlocking the Secrets." Sounded great on paper to use the might of a GE-owned broadcast network to air an infomercial for a series on a GE-owned basic cable network, one week before the show's season debut. But the one-hour ad clocked fewer than 3 million viewers, which is a smaller audience than "The 4400" already gets on USA, and it's not even a good number for NBC on a Saturday night.

"The Simple Life." Poor Paris and Nicole have learned the hard way that there are times when it is not all about them -- sometimes it's about the network they're on. Sunday's fourth-season debut of their rich-bimbettes-out-of-water series attracted fewer than 1.4 million viewers; the show's third season had averaged nearly 10 million viewers, on Fox.

"The Sopranos." Slightly fewer than 9 million viewers watched HBO's first telecast of the mob drama's season finale -- the smallest season-finale premiere audience since its first season. Meanwhile, "Big Love" wrapped its first season with about 4.5 million watching, which is on par with its premiere audience of about 4.6 million, also on a Sunday.

The week's 10 most watched shows, in order, were: NBC's Monday "Deal or No Deal"; CBS's "CSI," "Without a Trace," "CSI: Miami," "NCIS" and "Two and a Half Men"; NBC's Wednesday "Deal or No Deal"; CBS's "Criminal Minds"; Fox's Thursday "So You Think You Can Dance"; and CBS's "CSI: NY."