Lisa de Moraes TV Column: World Series, Rihanna win; Leno, Chris Brown lose

Yankees win, Chris Brown gets stomped on by Rihanna. Great week or what?

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

Winners

-- World Series. Fox made the safe bet that this year's Yankees-Phillies series would enjoy the biggest year-to-year ratings spike in World Series history -- no real gamble given that last year's play featured the Phillies taking on the Tampa Bay Rays instead of the New York Yankees, and Fox got Major League Baseball to move the start time to 7:30 p.m. instead of 8 so the games would wrap before baseball fans went to bed. Anyway, Fox was right: The series' 19.4 million average is nearly a 40 percent bigger viewing crowd than last year's record low of 13.6 million.

-- "Mad Men." You know it's a cable show when 2.3 million people tune in to the cliffhanger third-season finale (Betty wants a divorce! Don goes rogue at Sterling Cooper!) and it's heralded as a major ratings success. To be fair, it's the show's biggest audience ever -- behind only the series-record 2.8 million who caught the third-season debut in August.

-- George Lopez. "Viewers are ready for a change," Turner Entertainment Networks President Steve Koonin crowed of the 3 million people who checked out the unveiling of Lopez's new TBS late-night talk show on Monday. (This is Hollywood-speak for, "If those numskulls at NBC would put Jay Leno on at 11, like Lopez, he wouldn't get his clock cleaned by 'The Mentalist' because his time-slot competition would be local news.") The launch of "Lopez Tonight" was an orgy of Time Warner vertical integration: The show launch, on its home network TBS, was simulcast on TNT and TruTV, and his first guests included Warner Bros. syndication star Ellen DeGeneres, as well as Eva Longoria Parker, who had shared billing with Lopez in the CNN documentary "Latino in America."

Losers

-- Jay Leno. The TV Column is introducing a new game: It's called Guess Who Beat Jay Leno! Last week it was SpongeBob's 10th-anniversary special "SpongeBob SquarePants: Truth or Square" on Nickelodeon. Not only did SpongeBob log more viewers than Jay on Friday -- 8 million to Jay's 5 million -- but he also copped more of the 18-to-49-year-old audience Jay targets so assiduously and SpongeBob does not.

-- Chris Brown. Rihanna beat the snot out of Brown on Friday night: She gave her first TV interview about being beaten by former boyfriend Brown to ABC News's Princess Di on "20/20." Brown thought he'd preempt Rihanna's interview at 10 by doing his own interview with the always obsequious MTV network at 6. Rihanna's version was watched by more than 8 million viewers. Brown's interview logged 679,000 viewers. Among their target audience, 18-to-34-year-olds, Rihanna logged 1.6 million viewers -- "20/20's" biggest audience in that age bracket in three years. Brown, on the other hand, attracted just 328,000.

From 'Mother' to 'Dad'

CBS, which has struggled to find the perfect companion comedy to its youngest-skewing comedy, "How I Met Your Mother," thinks it may have finally found the answer to its prayers: "[Doody] My Dad Says."

The prospective sitcom -- so far CBS has ordered only a pilot script -- takes its name from a Twitter feed that we know is wildly popular because it has 700,000 followers. Which is interesting because, in broadcast TV, that is called "margin of error."

"[Doody] My Dad Says" is said to be the creation of a 29-year-old senior editor for Maxim.com who is represented by ICM, but who had to move back in with his parents and decided to tweet the ruminations of his 73-year-old father, Sam. Since its launch in August, it has coughed up such great gags as, "Oh please. You practically invented lazy. People should have to call you and ask for the rights to lazy before they use it."

I smell a 20 share.