Dirty Sexy Ratings

Finally, a couple of new shows had ratings that won’t have the networks flop-sweating and dry-heaving the season away. ABC’s “Private Practice’s” success was a foregone conclusion, and “Bionic Woman” was considered NBC’s best chance at a hit, and neither disappointed.

ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” continues to be the juggernaut of the new season, pulling down 16.62 million viewers Wednesday.

That sent the new shows reeling: “Kid Nation" was down 1.75 million viewers, to 7.6m. CBS was hoping to cash in on the controversy, but this is an Adult Nation that has tuned out the avalanche of scandal emanating from Washington; skirting child-labor laws is small potatoes. Fox’s “Back to You” suffered even greater viewer attrition, losing nearly 2 million viewers, down to 7.5 million – less, even, than “Kid Nation.” “’Til Death’s” renewal is looking ever more dubious: 6.2m sat through the slapsticky basketball stylings of Brad Garrett. Someone want to give the four-camera sitcom a decent Viking funeral?

The real showdown came at 9 p.m., with everyone except Fox and The CW able to cheer. “Private Practice,” the “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff, won the hour, of course, with 14.24 viewers, but “Bionic Woman” proved to be sturdier than some people expected – it was close behind with 13.6 million sets of eyeballs, human or bio-engineered, and actually had a higher rating in the advertiser friendly viewers-aged-18-49 category.

Mandy Patinkin took a sizable chunk of viewers with him when he left CBS’s “Criminal Minds,” but it still managed 12.7 million fans of perversion.

The CW’s “Gossip Girl” is proving to be the surprise disappointment of the season: A mere 2.55m viewers, off nearly a third of the viewers who tuned in last week and retention of only about half of its lead-in. Sure, network executives and industry analysts looked at the show and said, spoiled rich teenagers having sex and going on the Internets and getting wasted and text-messaging on their cell phones and smoking bud – it can’t miss. But every once in a while, teens have a pretty good horsesh!t detector and so it seems to have gone here (also, the fact that it can be hard to tell the kids from the parents probably didn’t help; it may have in fact alienated young viewers that they didn’t actually see themselves in those characters).

Fox’s “Kitchen Nightmares” isn’t turning up the heat much: 5.4m viewers. I guess the nation’s restaurants will continue to be filthy, germ-infested toilets, as Gordon Ramsay’s mission to clean them up appears to have a rather short shelf life.

Things get tricky at 10 p.m. “CSI: New York” had the most viewers, 12.7m, but the third-place show, NBC’s barely-promoted “Life,” was No. 1 in the 18-49 demo. Which leaves ABC’s heavily-hyped “Dirty Sexy Money” the nominal disappointment – despite a more lurid premise and a much more high-profile cast, it barely had 300,000 more viewers than “Life,” and most of them were apparently Donald Sutherland-aged fogies who don’t buy things from advertisers.

On the other hand, “Dirty Sexy Money” had less viewer tune-out over the course of its hour than “Life” did. They both started out with 10.8m viewers, but “DSM” ended with 10.04m, while “Life” dropped to 9.5m.

I told you it was tricky.