By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, November 9, 2006

Congress wasn't the only scene of a stunning upset on Election Night. While the Democrats were taking control of the House on Tuesday, ABC News was unseating perennial election coverage front-runner NBC News on broadcast television, and on cable in prime time, CNN pulled to within spitting distance of Fox News Channel and beat FNC among the 25-to-54 viewers advertisers hope to reach with news programming.

ABC News shrewdly started its "Vote 2006" coverage at 9:30 p.m. -- half an hour earlier than NBC and CBS -- to take advantage of the more than 23 million viewers delivered to Charlie Gibson's doorstep by "Dancing With the Stars."

(We'll pause here to give news junkies a little time to harrumph over that sentence.)

That was a tight race, too: Judges gave Mario Lopez an impressive 30 points for his tango, and 29 for his cha-cha-cha; they awarded Emmitt Smith 29 points for his waltz and 30 for his cha-cha-cha; and they handed Joey Lawrence 29 points for his quickstep, and his rumba brought in a score of 30.

Of the 23 million who sat glued to that performance show, about half hung on to watch the first half-hour of ABC's coverage of the political races. Overall, from 9:30 to 11 p.m., ABC News clocked an average of 9.67 million viewers.

And for 10 to 11 p.m., when the three broadcast news operations were going head-to-head, ABC News was still hanging on to 8.38 million viewers, thumping NBC News's 7 million and CBS News's 6.3 million.

Among those sought-after 25-to-54-year-olds, ABC had a slight edge over NBC and a slightly bigger margin over CBS.

The cable news election-night race was just as exciting. NBC cable cousin MSNBC suddenly sprang to life, averaging nearly 1 million viewers -- a 107 percent increase over its coverage of the 2002 midterms.

CNN logged just under 3 million viewers in prime time; Fox News Channel posted nearly 3.1 million viewers.

And, again in prime time, CNN had a slight edge over FNC among those 25-to-54-year-olds -- 1.33 million viewers to FNC's 1.25 million.

The story was much the same for the total day. From 6 a.m. to 3 a.m. FNC averaged 1.4 million and change to CNN's nearly 1.36 million and MSNBC's 805,000, with CNN slightly out front in the cherished demographic group.

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The same day Donald Rumsfeld resigned as defense secretary, CBS announced its decision to pull from the schedule its new drama series about a nuclear attack on the United States.

In truth, CBS also said it planned to bring "Jericho" back after a 10-week hiatus. But we're curious to see how many bloggers read past the first paragraph of an item. Now we can find out.

And there's no getting around the fact that during the "Jericho" hiatus, CBS has decided the perfect lead-in to its increasingly popular pervy crime drama "Criminal Minds" would be -- "King of Queens," so there's really no knowing what dark forces are at work over at the network.

Just like the Bush administration shrewdly waited until the morning after the election to announce Rummy's ouster, CBS cleverly waited until the Reporters Who Cover Television had published their articles excoriating ABC's plans to rest serialized doomsday drama "Lost" for 13 weeks so as to avoid airing repeats, before announcing virtually the same play pattern for "Jericho."

CBS mostly has stayed away from serialized dramas like "Jericho" because the nonserialized ones repeat so well for the network. "Jericho" is considered one of this season's surprise successes; it's averaging about 11 million viewers Wednesdays at 8 and, more important, it's providing "Criminal Minds" with the lead-in it needs to, as of last week, outstrip "Lost" in the 9 p.m. hour.

CBS originally mulled whether it wouldn't be better to keep "Jericho" where it was and air repeat episodes, but after remembering how badly serialized dramas have repeated since the days of "Knots Landing," the network decided to cut "Jericho's" run into two distinct, rerun-free seasons, the first of which will end with a cliffhanger Nov. 29.

In truth, this is not such a new scheduling stunt for the broadcast networks. Back in 2003, ABC cut up the season of "NYPD Blue" and ran it without reruns so as to goose its ratings in its waning days. "Blue" went off the air at the end of November and returned in early February and didn't miss a beat, ratings-wise.

More recently, Fox had success with the same strategy for "Prison Break."

To relaunch the show, CBS has scheduled a recap episode on Feb. 14, followed by an original episode on Feb. 21 looking at life in the little Kansas town of Jericho one day before the nuclear bombs go off around the country.

To keep die-hard fans from revolting during the break, CBS says it will "create an online destination" for the show including original content, recaps and previews and will continue to stream on its broadband channel all episodes that have aired to date; "Jericho" is CBS's most streamed show.