'Dancing With the Stars' leads ABC to strong week

NEW YORK  — ABC danced to one of its best ratings weeks of the season.

"Dancing With the Stars" topped its Fox rival, "American Idol," to be the most-watched show of the week for the first time this season, the Nielsen Co. said Tuesday. It was ABC's biggest week in the prime-time ratings since last November, with the exception of the week of the Academy Awards.

The move of ABC's "Private Practice" to a new time slot of Tuesday at 10 p.m. paid immediate dividends, with the show's largest audience in nearly a year and a half.

Now that NBC's "Today" show's 852-week winning streak in the ratings has been snapped, morning shows are having difficulty generating more than a one-week streak. ABC's "Good Morning America" topped the "Today" show in viewers last week for the second time since 1995. The week before, "Today" had recovered first place after losing it for the first time in more than 16 years.

Despite a sprinkling of April repeats in its prime-time schedule, CBS won the week, averaging 8.4 million viewers (5.4 rating, 9 share). ABC had 8 million viewers (5.2, 9), Fox had 7.3 million (4.5, 7), NBC had 5.2 million (3.3, 6), the CW had 1.2 million (0.8, 1) and ION Television had 1 million (0.7, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision led with a prime-time average of 3.7 million viewers (1.9 rating, 3 share), Telemundo had 1.2 million (0.7, 1), TeleFutura had 620,000 (0.3, 1), Estrella had 270,000 and Azteca 140,000 (0.1, 0).

NBC's "Nightly News" topped the evening newscasts with an average of 8.2 million viewers (5.5, 11). ABC's "World News" was second with 7.3 million (5.0, 10) and the "CBS Evening News" had 5.8 million viewers (3.9, 8).

A ratings point represents 1,147,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 114.7 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of April 23-29, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: "Dancing With the Stars," ABC, 17.62 million; "American Idol" (Wednesday), Fox, 16.87 million; "American Idol" (Thursday), Fox, 14.87 million; "Dancing With the Stars Results," ABC, 14.54 million; "Person of Interest," CBS, 12.73 million; "The Big Bang Theory," CBS, 12.65 million; "NCIS," CBS, 12.41 million; "The Mentalist," CBS, 12.03 million; "20/20 Special Edition," ABC, 10.69 million; "Blue Bloods," CBS, 10.47 million.