NBC Has 'News': Globes Nominee Interviews

A lot of people chose not to watch this year's People's Choice Awards (with Yomarie Tejada and Queen Latifah). (Prnewsfoto)

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Sunday's "American Gladiator" rerun may wind up being NBC's most watched show that night, judging by CBS's ratings results with its Tuesday night broadcast of the strike-ravaged People's Choice Awards.

After the Writers Guild declared the awards a "struck" show, it was reconfigured into a Home Shopping Networkesque nightmare that lacked an audience, lacked stars, lacked everything except Queen Latifah locked in a room wearing an evening gown, prattling hysterically to the camera about "The People" and introducing taped acceptance speeches given by winners with varying degrees of train-wreckedness.

Best of all was Reese Witherspoon, named favorite female movie star. In her canned acceptance speech from the set of her new flick, Witherspoon said she was soooooooo sorry she "couldn't be there" but she was soooooo busy on the set of her new movie, which she named about three times.

In his acceptance speech for the favorite leading man trophy, Joaquin Phoenix attempted to give a nod to striking writers, presenting his speech silently, using placards with words on them. Except he spelled his own name wrong, which seems to suggest someone else wrote the cards for him. Wouldn't that person be, um, a writer?

The People's Choice Awards show clocked its smallest audience on record -- just under 6 million viewers, compared with last year's more than 11 million viewers -- and plunged more than 50 percent among viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, who are the Holy Grail of advertisers.

On the other hand, that 5.96 million audience for the People's Choice Awards is still about 5.4 million more viewers than watched Monday night's Critics' Choice Awards, which was not struck by the Writers Guild and therefore was fairly thick with celebs, including George Clooney, Brangelina, Daniel Day-Lewis, Don Cheadle, D.L. Hughley, Mrs. Tom Cruise.

Despite the star wattage, the Critics' Choice Awards show tanked (in fairness, its best-ever number was just 3 million viewers, which it clocked two years ago on the now-defunct WB network) because it was on cable.

Not only that, it was on VH1 -- totally off-brand. Had Tila Tequila served up the Critics' Choice Awards version of all-around-nice-guy-of-the-year trophy to Cheadle, instead of George Clooney doing the honors, we might be telling another ratings story today.