Mother of Octuplets Delivers Ratings, Too

As a rule, it takes two football teams, or a star-studded trophy show, or the election of the country's first African American president, for NBC to cop a substantial number of viewers these days.

Or Octomom.

Nadya Suleman, she of no income, no job and 14 children -- including new octuplets -- attracted 11.3 million viewers Tuesday in her first post-delivery interview with NBC News's Ann Curry.

To put this in perspective, NBC's Golden Globes orgy of trophy dispensing clocked about 15 million viewers last month, and the network's election-night coverage logged 12.3 million.

Because she's obviously into tonnage, Suleman might be disappointed to learn that her interview did not cop TV's biggest crowd of the night -- or even in her time slot. More than 14 million people opted to watch CBS's "Without a Trace" in that 10 p.m. hour, and, earlier in the night, Fox's "American Idol" posted its usual 25 million viewers, while CBS's "The Mentalist" officially reached "hit" status with its best-ever crowd of just less than 20 million.

That said, Octomom did score the biggest crowds of adult chicks in her designated hour -- no surprise there.

She also delivered "Dateline's" biggest audience since Matt Lauer interviewed Princess Di's two kids, Princes William and Henry, way back in June of '07.

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The Writers Guild of America went into duck-and-cover mode when a report surfaced that it was still mulling the possibility of disciplining NBC late-night host Jay Leno for doing his "Tonight Show" monologues during the guild's strike last TV season.

"The Guild does not comment on internal matters," the WGA e-mailed in response to a report that it has brought disciplinary proceedings against Leno. The late-night host is a WGA member and writes for his NBC show, and he is expected to continue doing so when he moves his talk-show bag o' tricks to NBC's prime time in the fall. NBC has turned over to Leno its 10 p.m. hour, Monday through Friday, next season.

The kerfuffle started more than a year ago when Leno joined other late-night hosts -- ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and NBC's Conan O'Brien, among them -- in returning to the air without their writers for the first time since the WGA launched its strike.

Meanwhile, Leno's nemesis, David Letterman, returned to his CBS late-night show with his writers in tow after his Worldwide Pants company struck an interim deal with the WGA.

The difference is, Letterman's company owns both his CBS late-night show and Craig Ferguson's; NBC owns "Tonight Show" and host Leno is an employee.

Leno got a lot of press over his having paid his production staff out his own pocket in November and December 2007, when the strike was in its infancy. But when he finally went back on the air in January, he said he'd returned to work because no new talks were scheduled between the writers and the Hollywood studios (including NBC/Universal) and, in the case of his talk show, 19 writers were going to put 160 people out of work.

At the time, WGA went public with its outrage that Leno was writing his monologues, although it did not express the same concerns over other late-night hosts' written material -- like, say, Colbert and Stewart. Colbert even made a gag about some of his correspondents also returning to the show -- like John Oliver, a Brit comic who joked he's crossed the picket line because, otherwise, he was going to be deported.

NBC came back at the WGA when the guild got all knicker-knotted over the Leno monologues, insisting that the guild contract allowed Leno to come up with his own material. NBC declined to comment yesterday.

Among its options, the WGA might fine Leno, "censure" him or toss him out of the guild, Variety reported.