Western miniseries 'Broken Trail' skewed older, but ratings for part two had AMC riding high at No. 3 among basic cablers for the week.
It's rare when one cable network roars in out of left field to become a top-five-rated channel during a given week, but two of them -- AMC, in third place, and BET, in fifth -- made history for the week ended Sunday.
It took just one program to catapult each of those two nets out of obscurity and into the winners' circle. For AMC, it was June 26's part two of the Western miniseries "Broken Trail," the highest-rated program for the week in total viewers. The 9.77 million viewers who watched "Trail" surpassed the aud of the program's closest competitor on the ad-supported networks by more than 3 million.
That closest competitor was June 27's "The BET Awards," an annual event that honors achievement in music, acting and sports. Three-hour cablecast racked up 6.64 million viewers. Although "BET Awards" finished behind "Trail" in viewers, it came in first in the key demo categories of adults 18-49 and 18-34. ("Broken Trail," with Robert Duvall, skewed older, winning in adults 25-54 and those over 50.)
Coming in first and second in total viewers for the week, as usual, were USA and TNT. USA's winners were the two separate hours of World Wrestling's Monday-night "Raw" show, three episodes of "Law & Order: SVU" and an original episode of "The 4400."
TNT made hay with firstrun episodes of its back-to-back original series "The Closer" and "Saved" in Monday primetime, as well as two separate runs of the movie "Men in Black."
The Brazil/France soccer match on ESPN broke through with 3.8 million viewers for two hours at 3 p.m. Saturday, making it the sixth highest-rated program for the week in total viewers. An unusually strong rating for ESPN's coverage of the NBA Draft on June 28, particularly among young men, helped propel the net to an overall No. 4 in total viewers for the week.
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