Finally, some good news for poor Frank Cleri: Only 8.5
million people, on average, watched his wife emasculate him on prime-time TV.
Numbers for last
week''s Moment of Truth were the worst yet for the Fox game show, even as it aired its most notorious episode to date.
The season premiere of Oprah''s
Big Give , meanwhile, gave ABC a big lift, per the latest Nielsen Media Research rankings.
For The Moment of Truth , the results were decidedly mixed.
On one hand, the show finally delivered the sort of contestant that justified the purchase of its fancy polygraph equipment: Lauren Cleri, a New York woman who admitted to cheating on
husband Frank, admitted to loving a man other than husband Frank, and then blew all of her and husband Frank''s community-property prize money by lying about whether she
thought she was a good person. (She said she thought she was; the polygraph said she thought otherwise.)
On the other hand, the show couldn''t really cut it without American Idol.
Airing on a Monday minus its usual Idol lead-in, Moment of Truth got trumped by P. Diddy''s Sean Combs self, as seen in the ABC TV-movie A Raisin in the Sun (ninth place, 12.7 million), and fell from the Top 10, dropping all the way to 25th place. Still, it was one of Fox''s top shows, and, as best can be determined, the only one of the last week to potentially inspire a divorce proceeding.
Oprah''s Big Give , which premiered Sunday, had neither Idol, nor a salacious storyline on its side. Somehow, it managed to do well anyway.
The Oprah Winfrey-fronted reality show with a mission ranked fourth for the week, averaging 15.7 million viewers, a season high for a series debut.
But lest more be made of Oprah''s Big Give rise versus The Moment of Truth ''s fall, it''s worth noting that Winfrey''s brand of uplift wasn''t nearly as big as the show that usually airs in its time slot: Desperate Housewives.