Fox Dominates Ratings With "Idol" and "5th Grader"

Three nights of simple family entertainment that made it easy for parents and their children to watch television together helped lead Fox to another dominant week in the ratings.

Fox coupled three episodes of "American Idol" with three installments of the new trivia show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" in last weeks lineup. Jeff Foxworthy hosts the game show, which shows parents getting stumped by questions from grade school textbooks. It happened to be the most-watched series premiere in eight years (just behind the premiere of "Jesse" which ran in NBC's Thursday night lineup that dominated during its time period) with 27 million viewers.

Nothing else last week came within 5 million viewers of these programs, Nielsen Media Research revealed.

Rival networks have been placed in a situation in which they need to come up with some good ideas or simply concede certain nights to Fox. With 14.7 million viewers, "Survivor" was up slightly from the previous week, which was the slowly-dying reality veteran's smallest audience ever.

ABC and CBS aired reruns of "Grey's Anatomy" and "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" rather than go up against Fox on a Thursday that "American Idol" was on, reports David Bauer of the AP.

Overall, Fox averaged 15.3 million viewers in prime time last week, with second-place CBS averaging 11.8 million. Among people aged 18 to 34, Fox had more than double the audience of any other network.

NBC's 8.2 million viewers narrowly beat ABC's 8.1 million for third.