The Sked: CABLE RATINGS September 27-October 3

Sports dominate the top of the weekly cable ratings chart.  ESPN's NFL Monday Night Football was #1 again in the cable world, although down from a 7.2 demo rating last week when the more attractive Dallas-Washington game was on.  In addition, the early round of Major League Baseball's Postseason is scattered throughout the chart below. 

Naturally the highest-rated early round game featured the New York Yankees, a team with a huge fan base and a team others love to hate.  Program note: Wednesday night October 5, TBS will have the decisive Game 5 in the Detroit Tigers-NY Yankees series.  FOX and TBS executives are currently holding a vigil that the Yankees and not the Tigers advance to the next round.  FOX has to be pulling for a Philadelphia Phillies-NY Yankees World Series, as opposed to, say, Milwaukee Brewers-Detroit Tigers.


Another baseball note.  The "MLB Post Game" program in the chart below ranked #5 for the week, and capped ESPN's terrific coverage of the final night of the regular season (last Wednesday), when the wild card spots were finally decided in three close games in primetime.  The games themselves barely made the chart because the drama didn't build until the very end of the evening.  The post game rating shows the interest that did build like a crescendo. 

Boardwalk Empire and Dexter premiered against each other Sunday at 9 pm and tied at 1.1 rating, about a third of what True Blood routinely did in the time period.  Both episodes, by the way, were fairly slow as season premiere resets often are, but Dexter seemed especially uninspired and even lazy.  In contrast, the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad was filled with tension and excitement but failed to make our 1.0 rating cutoff for the chart (a 0.8 rating).