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Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Tues., Feb. 26) -- Celebrity Wife Swap outshines Golden Boy

By ED BARK
@unclebarkycom
The premiere of CBS' Golden Boy drew a bit bigger crowd Tuesday night than the launch of ABC's Celebrity Wife Swap. But the latter faced much tougher competition and ranked as D-FW's most-watched show among advertiser-prized 18-to-49-year-olds.

Wife Swap, with Kate (Her Again) Gosselin and Kendra (Her Again) Wilkinson trading spaces, drew a nice-sized 234,063 viewers opposite CBS' all-powerful NCIS (495,662).

NCIS usually also wins its hour with 18-to-49-year-olds. But Wife Swap turned the tables, besting the Mark Harmon-headed drama by a score of 118,008 viewers to 95,682 in this key demographic. ABC's The Taste, moved back an hour to 8 p.m., then fell to 123,916 total viewers, with 66,977 in the 18-to-49 age range.

At 9 p.m., Golden Boy won its time slot with 247,831 total viewers after inheriting 351,094 from CBS' preceding NCIS: Los Angeles. Among 18-to-49-year-olds, though, Golden Boy was soundly beaten by ABC's Body of Proof.

NBC's 9 p.m. attraction, Smash, continued to perform way off-key. It ran a distant fourth in both ratings measurements, with just 61,958 total viewers. The Peacock's entire prime-time lineup ran fourth all night.

Over on Fox Sports Southwest, the Dallas Mavericks again blew a game they should have won. this time falling to the visiting Milwaukee Bucks. It averaged 82,610 total viewers.

Here are the local news derby results for the next-to-last weekday of the February "sweeps" ratings period.

WFAA8 edged CBS11 in the 10 p.m. total viewers race and won more comfortably among 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming.

Fox4 logged two more wins at 6 a.m., where it's long been home free as the runaway sweeps champ at that hour.

WFAA8 won at 6 p.m. in total viewers and prevailed by a paper-thin margin at 5 p.m. in that measurement.

The 25-to-54 golds went to NBC5 at 5 p.m. and Fox4 at 6 p.m. The respective runners-up, Fox4 and WFAA8, were very close behind, though.
unclebarky@verizon.net