"Band" Leaders

Entertainment Weekly, September 2001

At press time, Nielsen's broadcast TV ratings were unavailable. As a result, we're running the most up-to-date cable rankings, which are dominated by attack coverage on CNN (a division of EW parent AOL Time Warner, as is HBO). The news net averaged 2.28 million households, beating second-place Fox News Channel by more than a million households. Surprisingly, coverage of the history-making terrorist acts did not break records for CNN; their numbers were higher in 1991 during the Gulf War. Meanwhile, HBO's Band of Brothers (1st) played on, but the audience dropped off by 26 percent from the week before. The loss of 2.7 million viewers hardly shocked execs at the cable net, who had pulled all print and on-air advertising for the pedigreed World War II drama.