THURSDAY RATINGS PLUNGE ACROSS THE BOARD

Ordinarily Thursday is television’s biggest night of the week. It’s also the night when advertisers spend the most. But those advertisers will likely be unhappy with what they got for their money on Thursday of this week. as audiences declined across the board. ABC aired the live finale of its singing-competition series Duets but drew just 4.5 million viewers. NBC’s series, The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Saving Hope produced barely a blip on Nielsen’s ratings chart, averaging fewer than 2.2 million viewers. Its highest-rated show of the night was the floundering Rock Center with Brian Williams , which counted 3.4 million viewers. Fox also averaged fewer than 2.7 million viewers for the week. That left CBS to pick up the spoils with a slate of reruns that averaged just 6.5 million viewers.