The Apple of CBS's Eye: Katie Couric Tops Competition

Nearly 14 million people watched Katie Couric take off as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" on Tuesday, dwarfing her competition on NBC and ABC.

Had Couric's debut aired in prime time, it would be one of this week's five top shows. Last week's No. 1 show, "CSI: Miami," clocked fewer than 11 million viewers. And so far this week, only the season-starter of Fox's hit doc drama "House" has drawn a bigger crowd.

Here's a look at the riveting stats:

WINNERS

Katie Couric. After weeks of preparation, including a CBS photo department liposuction and a carefully orchestrated Listening Tour of the United States, the former "Today" show co-host debuted as solo anchor of the "CBS Evening News" with a hefty 13.6 million viewers. The network pointed out that this is 84 percent better than the newscast did the same night a year ago, when Dan Rather was the face of "CBS Evening News," and that Couric's competitors, NBC's Brian Williams and ABC's Charles Gibson, were left eating her dust, with average audiences of 7.8 million and 7.6 million viewers, respectively.

Her audience of 13.59 million viewers is big for an evening newscast these days. It's about 6.4 million more than the CBS newscast snagged last week, which was Bob Schieffer's last as fill-in anchor. And CBS News chief Sean McManus gave his press department an I'm-really-happy-but- this-is-a-marathon-not-a-sprint quote to dole out to the media.

Still, considering Couric's anchor debut is one of those milestones that coeds will be forced to memorize in Women's Studies 101 at universities around the country for the rest of time -- you know, the very first broadcast by the very first woman to get her very own network-TV evening newscast -- you can't help but wish CBS's historical talking points had been something more, oh, tantalizing than: "The 13.59 million total viewers are the most for the broadcast since Feb. 16, 1998, which occurred during CBS's coverage of the Olympic Winter Games in Nagano."

Somehow "Couric Debut: Biggest Since Nagano" was not the headline we'd be going for.

CBS also mentioned that Tuesday night "marked the largest margin of victory in total viewers by CBS over both NBC and ABC since at least September 1993, the first available date of daily ratings in the CBS database."

Again "Couric: Biggest Win Since Our Database Kicked In" just lacks a certain sexiness.

But Couric's debut comes at a time when women have been solo-anchoring news programs on cable networks for years, and many viewers have gotten out of the habit of watching broadcast-TV evening newscasts. Except for older viewers -- nearly 60 percent of Couric's audience, about 8 million viewers, was 55 or older. She in fact attracted about 11 percent of the country's 55-plus audience, as that group is called.

CBS is, of course, hoping that Couric will young-up the newscast because advertisers pay more money for younger viewers, and the evening newscasts, like entertainment programs, are what the networks have come up with to fill the time between the ads.

On the other hand, Couric seems to have brought lapsed evening-news viewers back to the fold Tuesday night. Gibson's audience on ABC was on par with his average for the previous week, and among 25-to-54-year-olds -- the target demographic group of news programming -- Gibson was up a tick. NBC's newscast suffered more, which is understandable given that Couric spent years at NBC; Williams's newscast posted about 800,000 fewer viewers than he'd averaged last week, though his 25-54 stats held firm.

In the Washington market the story was much the same: Couric logged an average of 223,000 viewers on her first night. In that same half-hour, the second half of NBC-owned WRC's local newscast logged 175,000 viewers and ABC's network newscast averaged 111,000 viewers.

"Kyle XY." Finale of ABC Family series logged just under 3 million viewers last Monday -- the cable network's most watched original series telecast ever.

LOSERS

Dan Rather . Just 4.4 million viewers watched the CBS retrospective on its longtime news anchor. The network creatively scheduled it for the Friday night leading into a holiday weekend, just four days before Couric's debut as his replacement and all the comparisons that would invite. (See "Couric" under Winners, above.)

MTV Video Music Awards. Officially irrelevant after scoring fewer than 6 million viewers last Thursday. Last year the MTV trophy show copped about 8 million, in '04 about 10 million and as recently as '02 a whopping 12 million. Among teens, it was VMA's worst showing on record.

The week's 10 most-watched shows, in order, were: CBS's "CSI: Miami"; NBC's "Law & Order: SVU"; CBS's "Two and a Half Men"; Fox's "Prison Break"; and CBS's "60 Minutes," another broadcast of "Two and a Half Men," "CSI," "Without a Trace," "Criminal Minds" and "CSI: NY."