JERSEY SHORE SHOWS MUSCLE IN SECOND WEEK

For the second week in a row, MTV’s Jersey Shore drew more viewers than anything aired on broadcast television Thursday night. While the MTV show attracted 7.4 million viewers (down 16 percent from last week’s season premiere) and 2.4 million more for the repeat at 11:00 p.m. (not to mention several million more who watched online), the best that the broadcast networks were able to offer were CBS’s Big Brother (7.1 million), a rerun of CBS’s Big Bang Theory (6.5 million), and the season finale of Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance (6.1 million). Its major competition on cable was the Republican presidential debate in Iowa with 5.1 million viewers (which nevertheless turned out to be, far and away, the most-watched presidential debate of the year). ESPN’s telecast of the Seahawks/Chargers game captured 4.39 million viewers.Meanwhile, Jersey Shore‘s Snooki won over no additional viewers in Montana on Friday. Asked by a Montana radio station whether she had any plans to visit the state, she replied, “Where is Montana?” then: “Is that a state?”