Prison Break's Start as Slow as Fox's

Los Angeles (E! Online) - So, when does American Idol start up again?

Fox may be asking itself that question after a rough start to its fall season. If it wasn't the Emmys sinking, or one of its new shows tanking, it was Prison Break's season premiere getting beat out by sitcom reruns.

Last things first: Prison Break. The drama's third-season opener on Monday night averaged an estimated 7.4 million viewers, preliminary Nielsen Media Research stats show. It was the series' least watched premiere, down nearly 2 million viewers from last fall's.

Previously viewed episodes of How I Met Your Mother (10.9 million) and The New Adventures of Old Christine (12.4 million) on CBS locked out Prison Break in the 8-9 p.m. hour.

Prison Break's numbers, as well as those from the rest of Monday night's shows, will be reflected in next week's Nielsen rankings.

To say that Nashville, the first new show of the 2007-08 season to make it to air, fared even worse than Prison Break doesn't say the half of it: It fared much, much, much worse.

The reality drama, from the production company behind Laguna Beach, made the least of its jump-start on the fall season by losing to the rerun of one show that doesn't replay especially well (NBC's Las Vegas—72nd place, 3.9 million) and to the rerun of another show that doesn't replay well at all (CBS' Jericho—89th place, 3 million).

Nashville averaged just 2.7 million viewers, 1 million fewer even than what Laguna Beach spinoff, The Hills, delivered to cable's MTV last week.

Perhaps the worst news of all for Nashville: It didn't merit a single positive adjective, much less a single complete sentence in Fox's weekly ratings recap. Such silence is typically deadly.

Nashville is part of Fox's all-new, unscripted Friday night. In the 8-9 p.m. hour, the network got decent results from Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? (55th place, 5 million), which emerged as the top-rated show among 18- to 49-year-olds in its time-slot premiere.

Fox also had success Monday with the series premiere of K-Ville, the new New Orleans cop show starring Hustle & Flow's Anthony Anderson. It averaged an estimated 9 million viewers and claimed the night's demo crown.

On the further upside for Fox, K-Ville, the network noted, "showed impressive growth over its lead-in." On the further downside, K-Ville's lead-in was Prison Break.