Cable roared into the first of March last week, quickly filling the vacuum left by the broadcasters’ post-sweeps retreat into reruns with their own original movies and series.
    Original series got the most dramatic boost, with 42 regularly scheduled series making the list of the top 50 highest rated ad-supported cable programs. And not all of them were Nickelodeon cartoons or TNN’s WWF.
    Lifetime and Discovery had two original series apiece in the list, MTV had two episodes of "Jackass," and TBS had one entry, "Ripley’s Believe It or Not." 
    Fox News’s coverage of Bush’s address to the nation also made the top 50.
    Add in the five original Lifetime movies, the usual assortment of Nickelodeon cartoons, and two episodes of the WWF, and you discover that only 10 of the top 50 ad-supported cable programs last week were feature films or reruns of old broadcast series.
   (For those doing the math, there are technically 58 programs in the top 50 because of an 11-way tie for 48^th place.)
    And none of this even takes into account the 11.3 million viewers that HBO’s third-season premiere of "The Sopranos" attracted on Sunday night.
    Cable folks say that last week’s numbers were simply the combined result of a post-sweeps letdown by broadcasters and a big promotional push by the cable networks.
    "Broadcast and cable do this thrust and parry," says Ray Giacopelli, senior vice president for research at USA. "After sweeps, the broadcasters step back a little, and cable steps forward. You’re going to see more promotion [on cable] as soon as the sweeps are over."
    In primetime household rankings, Lifetime ranked first for the week with an unusually high rating for its original series "Strong Medicine." The Sunday night series was the fifth highest-rated show in households last week, pulling in 2.7 million homes. Its lead-out show, "The Division," retained 76 percent of the medical drama’s audience, good enough for 26^th place last week.
    "Strong Medicine’s" and "The Division’s" ratings were boosted by the original movie that played before them, "False Arrest, Part 2." The movie ranked even higher than "Strong Medicine" last week, finishing in third place in households with 3.2 million homes.
    On Tuesday, Discovery also had strong performances by two of its original series, "New Detectives: Case Studies" and "The FBI Files." In households, "The FBI Files" ranked 11th and the "New Detectives" ranked 26th, putting Discovery in eighth place during primetime last week.
    But in the demos, original movies and series were less successful than they were in households, accounting for only five of the top 10 programs among adults 18-49 and four of the top 10 programs among adults 25-54.
    The top five original shows among adults 18-49 were three wrestling programs, MTV’s "Jackass," and Lifetime’s "False Arrest." Among adults 25-54, the top four original programs were TNN’s two WWF programs, "Strong Medicine," and "False Arrest."