Out in Left Field: New Series, World Series

With Joe Theismann, Tony Kornheiser and Mike Tirico, the new ESPN "Monday Night Football" broadcasts have enjoyed stellar ratings of late. (By Lawrence Jackson -- Associated Press)

New series continued to drop like flies last week, while having no breakout freshman hit left networks anxious. Also, the first two games of the World Series didn't pan out so well for Fox, but football exploded on ESPN.

Here's a look at the week's touchdowns and strikeouts:

WINNERS

"Monday Night Football." ESPN's coverage of the Chicago Bears' thrilling win over the Arizona Cardinals scared up an average audience of 14.2 million last week, beating all the broadcast networks in prime time. ESPN trumped that this past Monday when its coverage of the New York Giants' victory over the Dallas Cowboys copped 16.028 million viewers -- which is not, as ESPN claimed, the biggest audience in the history of cable television. The stranger-than-fiction November 1993 debate between Al Gore and Ross Perot on CNN's "Larry King Live" clocked an average of 16.837 million viewers, for instance. In making its claim, ESPN was referring to the number of "households" its game coverage averaged, rather than the number of actual people. But, of course, houses don't watch TV -- people do.

"Heroes." NBC's new Monday ensemble drama is this season's No. 3 series among 18-to-34-year-olds, behind only ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" and "Desperate Housewives" -- a very healthy development for a network trying to rise from the ashes of its former self.

"Project Runway." Los Angeles troll designer Jeffrey Sebelia won the third round of Bravo's fashion-design competition and attracted a crowd of nearly 5.4 million -- the NBC Universal cable network's biggest audience ever and nearly as many viewers as Tina Fey's much-ballyhooed sitcom "30 Rock" clocked on the NBC network at 8 that night. Next day, NBC Universal announced scripted series are dead to NBC at 8. Coincidence?

"Dancing With the Stars." More than 21 million people -- the ABC show's biggest audience ever except for its Season 1 and 2 finales -- stuck with it for nearly 90 minutes on Tuesday to hear host Tom Bergeron interview contestant-crooner Sara Evans in the final few minutes about why she quit the show so abruptly. Evans repaid them for their patience by revealing that it was because of something too private to discuss having to do with filing for divorce from Hubby.

"The Class." CBS has ordered additional scripts on its struggling new Monday sitcom, which means it wants to see where the struggling series is going creatively before deciding whether to continue with it. That's the good news -- and the bad news.

"Shark." James Woods's lawyer drama pulls to within 10,000 viewers of Thursday 10 p.m. time-slot winner "ER" and wins a full-season pickup.

"The Game." Having canceled half of the new series on its schedule -- that would be "Runaway" -- CW last week gave a full-season pickup to the other half, "The Game."