X FACTOR DRAWS SMALLEST AUDIENCE TO DATE

Ordinarily Fox TV waits until after its coverage of post-season baseball before introducing its fall lineup, since the baseball coverage tends to disrupt viewer habits. It may regret not having followed that strategy in the case of Simon Cowell’s The X Factor, whose ratings plummeted when a rained-out game forced it to move to Sunday night. Only 8.6 million viewers tuned in, the smallest number of the season for the show. Cowell has been predicting that The X Factor will eventually draw 20 million viewers routinely, as American Idol, the show he left, currently does. On Sunday, X Factor proved to be no competition for Sunday Night Football, which remained the No. 1 show of the night — and probably for the week — and the final game of the National League’s championship, which aired on TBS. (On AMC, the season 2 premiere of The Walking Dead set a basic-cable ratings record with 7.3 million viewers.)