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Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Mon., July 23) -- Rangers score on two fronts

By ED BARK
@unclebarkycom
Fox Sports Southwest and ESPN two-timed the Rangers-Red Sox game Monday night, with the homegrown numbers far superior.

FSS also gave viewers and tweeters more to chew on when analyst Tom Grieve announced the on-air end of his "Cookie Talk" segments. They'll now be exiled to the FSS website, meaning that Flora Flour of Flower Mound might want to reconsider sending her chocolate pecan, double-frosted sugar cookies up to the booth if they're not even going to drop her name on teevee anymore.

Grieve said that the volume of sweets has gotten a bit out of hand, prompting the switch. That's no doubt not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But whatever. Jim "Knoxie" Knox's oft-aggravating in-game fan segments for now are still part of FSS telecasts.

The game itself, which stretched to 10:12 p.m., averaged 209,998 D-FW viewers on FSS and another 94,837 on ESPN. That's a grand total of 304,835 viewers for Texas' 9-1 victory. And that again easily was enough to top all of Monday's TV attractions.

Fox's 7 p.m. hour of Hell's Kitchen ranked No. 2 in prime-time with a pretty sturdy 189,675 viewers.

Fox4's 6 p.m. U.S. Senate debate between Republicans David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz had just 67,741 viewers to rank fourth in that hour opposite a mix of local newscasts and syndicated programming on NBC5, WFAA8 and CBS11. The latter station's Wheel of Fortune almost tripled the debate crowd with 196,449 viewers.

Rangers-Red Sox also ruled the roost among advertiser-prized 18-to-49-year-olds. Hell's Kitchen ran second overall in prime-time in this key demographic.

ABC's two-hour season premiere of Bachelor Pad had a lackluster 81,289 total viewers before the network's Big Brother knockoff, Glass House, registered as prime-time's least-watched attraction among the Big Four broadcast networks with 33,871 viewers.

Fox4 had a big day in the four-way local news derby results, sweeping the 10 p.m., 6 a.m. and 5 p.m. competitions in both total viewers and 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming.

But Dewhurst-Cruz kept the station from potentially achieving a very rare double grand slam. Instead the downsized three-way 6 p.m. local news wars went to WFAA8 in total viewers and NBC5 in the 25-to-54 demographic.