By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, June 5, 2008

CNN ruled cable news the historic night of the Montana and South Dakota primaries, which wrapped up the Democratic presidential nomination derby in favor of Sen. Barack Obama.

CNN clocked more than 3.5 million viewers in prime time. That's a 34 percent lead over MSNBC's more than 2.5 million viewers. It's also a 47 percent advantage over Fox News Channel's prime-time crowd of 2.4 million viewers.

Yes, it appears MSNBC edged out FNC in prime time Tuesday.

Among CNN's prime-time audience, 1.4 million fell into the 25-to-54 age bracket that is the target audience of news operations. MSNBC's prime-time crowd included just over 1 million 25-to-54-year-olds. CNN logged a whopping 91 percent lead over FNC among 25-to-54-year-olds; FNC's prime-time audience included 739,000 in the age bracket.

CNN also wants you to know Anderson Cooper's 10 p.m. program snared more than 4.5 million viewers and was the only cable news program to top 4 mil for an hour Tuesday night.

And, in one of those incredible coincidences that make covering television so fulfilling, Cooper's audience is virtually identical to that of the resurrection, one night earlier, of the show that introduced many American viewers to Cooper, ABC's "The Mole."

True, "The Mole" delivered a slightly larger crowd -- 4.7 million viewers -- in its return to the ABC lineup.

And yes, ironically, a crowd of 4.5 million, the number who watched Cooper's CNN show, is a terrific audience for that network, while 4.7 million for "The Mole" is a big disappointment for ABC. In fact it's nearly 50 percent smaller than the crowd that caught the most recent premiere of "The Mole," which, granted, was nearly 4 1/2 years ago when the broadcast TV picture looked a whole lot brighter.

"The Mole," you'll recall, was first unveiled on ABC in January '01, followed quickly by a second round that debuted in September -- about a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. ABC yanked that second edition after just a few broadcasts but returned the show the next summer. It did okay then, so ABC ordered two celebrity editions, after which the show vanished.

The two celebrity editions were not hosted by Cooper because, hello, he is the celebrity, and besides, he'd already fled to CNN.

* * *

One year after announcing it would produce a pilot for a half-hour comedy series called "The United States of Tara," Showtime announced it had "fast-tracked" the show, about a wife/mom who suffers from dissociative identity disorder, the new multiple-personality disorder.

Toni Collette will star in the series, the idea for which was concocted by Steven Spielberg; his DreamWorks is producing with Showtime.

And, speaking of multiple personalities, at Spielberg's suggestion, the pilot was written by Brook Busey. She's the copyreader-cum-stripper-cum-blogger-cum-novelist-cum-screenwriter who prefers you call her Diablo-as-in-Spanish-for-Devil Cody-as-in-Wyoming, in an effort to erase all trace of her suburban upbringing and Catholic school education.

Busey/Cody is best known as the chick who wrote "Juno," for which she was given an Academy Award while wearing the most hideous Oscar-accepting get-up since Cher.

Brook/Diablo will be a writer on the series. Showtime programming chief Bob Greenblatt noted in yesterday's fast-track announcement that the CBS pay-cable network is known as the home of several shows featuring flawed main characters. And while, yes, it's true that also describes most every cable network, Showtime's flawed characters are laps ahead of the competition, including serial wife-killer Henry VIII and serial killer-killer Dexter.

For those of you not familiar with Collette, most people will tell you to catch her in "Little Miss Sunshine." Don't you believe it -- she had no chance to shine in that flick. Better to catch her in "Muriel's Wedding," her brilliant comedic performance in the Gwyneth Paltrow version of Jane Austen's "Emma," or as the suicidal single mom in the Hugh Grant-starrer "About a Boy."