Monday 01/02/12 - ESPN Fiesta Bowl Overshadows Weak Bachelor Premiere on ABC

As college football's Bowl season continued Monday night, ESPN's coverage of the 2012 Fiesta Bowl (4.47 Live A18-49 Rating) between the #3 Oklahoma State Cowboys and #4 Stanford Cardinal was the highest rated program with A18-49, fueling the network to average the evening's largest A18-49 audience.

Among the broadcast networks, CBS returned with a full slate of original programming for the first time in over three weeks. The network's most recent episodes of How I Met Your Mother (2.80), 2 Broke Girls (3.30), Two and a Half Men (3.61), Mike & Molly (3.21) and Hawaii Five-O (2.53) combined to average the second largest A18-49 viewership of the evening, despite only 2 Broke Girls reporting a larger audience than its previous original airing on 12/12/11.

ABC opened the New Year with a Monday night of premieres, as the network scheduled the two-hour 16th season opener of The Bachelor (1.74) at 8pm followed by the 7th season debut of Celebrity Wife Swap (2.11) at 10pm. While the former declined 26% among A18-49 viewers from its previous season premiere a year ago, the latter program showed a 4% improvement over last year's airing of Castle.

Also rolling out fresh episodes of its Monday night fare, NBC placed third among A18-49 broadcast viewers, though experienced slight declines with its latest episodes of Who's Still Standing? (1.40) and Fear Factor (2.14) from the previous original airings. The network's 10pm telecast of Rock Center with Brian Williams (1.09) however, reported an increase of 38% with A18-49 viewers from a week ago.

Both FOX and The CW continued with their repeat lineups this week, as FOX featured back-to-back episodes of House at 8pm (1.11) and 9pm (1.20), while The CW went with back-to-back airings of The Secret Circle (0.29, 0.25), landing the network's fourth and fifth, respectively, with A18-49 among the Big 5 broadcast networks.

Source: Nielsen, based on Live data