It's All Ball for ABC's Eighth Straight Thursday Win

CBS had the most viewers last week, but ABC enjoyed its best summer week in two years, compliments of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics.

Here's a look at the week's slam dunks and air balls:

WINNERS

NBA Finals. ABC snapped Fox's 22-week winning streak among the 18-to-49-year-old viewers advertisers covet, thanks to three Lakers-Celtics games. Sunday's Game 5 clocked nearly 14 million people, making it the second most watched NBA Finals matchup since the Disney-owned network began to carry the games in '03. And NBA play delivered ABC its eighth straight Thursday win, for the network's longest streak on that night in at least 16 years.

"Nashville Stars" set a new series record -- 6.7 million viewers -- and more than doubled the total viewer tally of its previous best-ever season debut, simply by switching networks from USA to NBC. "Nashville" buried ABC's "The Mole" at 10 p.m.

U.S. Open. The final two hours of Sunday's Tiger Woods-Rocco Mediate tie game averaged 16.4 million viewers in prime time -- up more than 20 percent over last year's Sunday prime-time coverage -- giving NBC its biggest Sunday audience since early January. Sadly for NBC, since the coverage started at 3 p.m., the prime-time portion gets included in NBC's weekly prime-time average, but the broadcast is not listed in the rankings of the week's shows.

The Tony Awards crept up to 6.3 million viewers, from last year's record-low 6.2 million -- and last year the trophy show didn't have to compete in some markets against a Lakers-Celtics game and Tiger Woods.

"Weeds." First telecast of fourth-season debut on Showtime this past Monday clocked 1.35 million viewers. Granted, that doesn't sound like much relative to all the media hoopla about it, except it's 64 percent better than its year-ago debut crowd of 824,000 viewers.

LOSERS

"The Bill Engvall Show." Considering the show was sampled by 6.4 million viewers last Monday on CBS, shouldn't the second-season debut three nights later on TBS have done better than 2.9 million viewers? Particularly when the series debut last July clocked 3.9 million and the show's first-season finale had mustered 2.7 million? Anyway, no show ought to be able to get away with those promos-from-Hell TBS was running to hype Engvall's return. In them, a mini-Engvall carrying a mini-remote control walked out into our TV screens in front of "The Office" rerun we were trying to watch, clicked the mini-remote, stopping "The Office" episode, and forced us to endure his "Hi, I'm Bill Engvall!" perky blather before we could get back to "The Office."

"One Tree Hill." Monday rerun on CW logged a sad 860,000 viewers -- about a hundred thou fewer than a "Celebrity Exposé" rerun on My Network TV in the same time slot. Only one show on five English-language broadcast networks did worse last week -- a Sunday "One Tree Hill" rerun. That posted a very sad 717,000 viewers against the Lakers and golf in some markets.

The week's 10 most watched shows, in order, were: ABC's NBA Finals Games 5, 3 and 4; CBS's "Two and a Half Men," "NCIS," "CSI," "Million Dollar Password," "48 Hours Mystery" and "CSI: NY"; and Fox's Wednesday "So You Think You Can Dance."