RATINGS RAT RACE: ‘America’s Got Talent’ & ‘Extreme Weight Loss’ Down, ‘Food Fighters’ Rises As NBC Wins Night

There wasn’t any original scripted television on primetime Tuesday but there was still a lot of drama. As almost meanie Howie Mandel pointed out, tiny trio Dom The Bom’s Triple Threat didn’t give one of their best performances on America’s Got Talent (1.9/6) last night but the live 2-hour quarterfinals show didn’t suffer much for it. For one thing, 12-year old singer Quintavious Johnson “tore the roof off the place,” as Nick Cannon said, so the kids were well represented among the dozen acts competing to make it the finals. For another thing, while AGT was down 10% from its August 12 show and tied a series low in preliminary ratings, the NBC series commonly sees adjustments in the final numbers. Plus, AGT was the highest rated and most watched show of the night with a viewership of 9.39 million. Lead-in Food Fighters (1.1/4) had a tasty night of its own. After dipping for the past few weeks, the Adam Richman-hosted series was up 10% among adults 18-49 over its August 12 show. NBC won the night with a 1.6/4 rating and 7.80 million viewers. Univision was second in the demo with a 1.2/4 rating while encore dominated CBS was second in viewers with an audience of 7.09 million.

With CBS, Fox and the CW all in repeats, the only other network going original was ABC and they went reality for the most part as usual. For the first time, Extreme Weight Loss (0.9/3) saw a contestant booted off the show for bad behavior. Unfortunately that didn’t seem to be a big draw. Last night also saw the 8 PM – 10 PM pound shedding show drop 25% itself among adults 18-49 from its August 12 broadcast. Last week’s 20/20 (0.8/3) special tribute to Robin Williams delivered very strong results for the news mag show. Not unexpectedly, this week’s 10 PM broadcast was down. 20/20 dropped 53% from the homage to the Oscar winner, who committed suicide on August 11.