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Rather's Lawsuit Against CBS Tossed Out

Dan Rather's lawyer says they intend to file an appeal of the New York court decision. (By Kathy Willens -- Associated Press)

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Here's a look at the week's winners and losers:

Winners

"NCIS." Try to find someone who had forecast that this CBS drama, in its seventh season, would debut with its biggest audience ever -- 21 million viewers -- and wind up the most watched show of Premiere Week. Can't be done. And, when the ratings dust settled on the first week of the 2009-10 TV season, "NCIS" was followed most closely by its own spinoff, "NCIS: Los Angeles," with 19 million -- the season's most successful new-series launch so far.

"The Cleveland Show." Seth MacFarlane's "Family Guy" spinoff attracted the most young viewers of any new series with its debut Sunday. In hard numbers, "The Cleveland Show" attracted 6.5 million 18-to-49-year-olds. By the way, that seventh-season debut of "NCIS" on your grandmother's network, CBS, also attracted about that many 18-to-49-year-olds.

"House." Abandoning the show's "children" to focus on Dr. House paid off for Fox, which won the first night of the new TV season for the first time in the network's history.

"Modern Family." Despite the show's obvious Kiss of Death Trifecta:

1. Critics love it.

2. It's a single-camera comedy with no laugh track.

3. It's a comedy on ABC.

. . . the ensemble series had a big opening night, attracting a crowd that rivaled that of CBS's hot comedy "Big Bang Theory" -- 13 million viewers. It was ABC's biggest comedy audience in two years.

Losers

"The Beautiful Life: TBL." One day after Nielsen sent word that the audience for the second episode of Ashton Kutcher's new supermodel soap had fallen to under 1 million viewers, CW announced it was yanking the show effective immediately and earning "TBL" the distinction of becoming the season's first cancellation. Ashton consoled himself over the weekend tweeting inspirational words from Winston Churchill and Aristotle, while also re-tweeting a Save TBL petition that had been launched on Petitiononline.com.

NBC. The network suffered its smallest Premiere Week total audience on record -- 7.6 million viewers -- with a prime-time slate that ran like a river of tears. Except Sunday football. Football did great: the week's fourth-most-watched program and No. 1 among the under-50-year-old viewers that advertisers pay a premium to reach. But after football, NBC's biggest audience of Premiere Week was scored by new nurse drama "Mercy" and "Law & Order: SVU," which ranked Nos. 39 and 40 with audiences of about 8 million each.

"Dollhouse." The second-season debut of Fox's ooh-it's-from-Joss-Whedon! drama series, in which star Eliza Dushku played a bride hooker, attracted only a lousy 2.5 million viewers. Fox says this show is a hit anyway because it attracts so many 18-to-34-year-olds. The season debut attracted 659,000 and one hour later, old-timer Jay Leno, on NBC, attracted 832,000 of them.

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