Westminster pooch parade also hits with 18-49s

By Elizabeth White
   
    If Joe Lieberman wanted folks to stop watching MTV’s "Jackass," he probably should’ve kept his mouth shut.
    Sunday night’s episode was the seventh-highest-rated show among adults 18-49 last week, reaching 1.9 million viewers in that demographic.
    It also cracked the top 50 of the highest-rated programs in households, coming in at 37^th for the week with 1.9 million households.
    Last month, Lieberman, a vocal opponent of TV violence, set off a small controversy about the show when he criticized it for inspiring a 13-year-old to set himself on fire. 
    On the show in question, the host, Johnny Knoxville, wearing a fire-resistant suit, lay across a barbecue and had his "friends" douse him with lighter fluid. The boy who tried to re-create this stunt landed in the hospital in critical condition.
    In an earlier review, Media Life television critic Andrew Wallenstein, noting the show's generally casual attitude about safety, warned that "Jackass" was an accident waiting to happen.
    For its part, MTV rates the show as TV-MA (for mature audiences) and warns, "The following show features stunts performed by professionals and/or total idiots under very strict control and supervision. MTV and the producers insist that neither you nor anyone else attempt to re-create or perform anything you have seen on this show."
    "Jackass" was MTV’s only program last week to make the top 10 in demos or the top 50 in households.
    A different TV-related tragedy put another show in the top 10 among both adults 18-49 and adults 25-54 last week. Dale Earnhardt’s death on the final lap of the Daytona 500 drew over 1.7 million adults 18-49 and 1.7 million adults 25-54 to ESPN2’s Sunday night motor-sports show, "RPM 2Night."
     In households, 1.9 million homes tuned in to CNN for coverage of the driver’s death, tying the news event with "Jackass" for 37^th place for the week.
    These two programs, along with the Bruce Willis action movie "Mercury Rising" on USA, the military drama "A Few Good Men" on TBS, two showings of the Steven Seagal action movie "Hard to Kill" on TBS, and both hours of the WWF on TNN, made for a pretty violent week of top 10 programming among adults 18-49.
    But Lieberman can thank his lucky stars for the "Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show" on USA, which managed to finish eighth and tenth among adults 18-49 last week. The show’s six hours averaged nearly 1.8 million adults 18-49.
    In households, the dog show did even better, coming in fourth and sixth, and reaching an average of 2.9 million homes. Only the WWF and "Hard to Kill" did better in households.
    Other top 10 programs in households were "A Few Good Men," five episodes of "Rugrats" on Nickelodeon, and two Lifetime movies, "Deadly Relations" and "Liar, Liar: Between Father & Daughter." "Rugrats" reached an average of 2.4 million homes per episode last week. The Saturday afternoon Lifetime movies also reached an average of 2.4 million homes.
    Notably absent from the week’s cable rankings is the XFL on TNN. That means that last week’s game between Chicago and Birmingham attracted fewer than 1.8 million adults 18-49 and fewer than 1.6 million households. As a result, TNN had only two shows make the top 50 programs among households last week, both of them WWF.

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