Espn Swings With Heavy Hitters

Baseball fans still have home run fever.

ESPN's coverage of the Home Run Derby during the All-Star break Monday generated the biggest audience of the year for any program on the network.

The home run-hitting contest that began at 8 p.m. ET was seen in an average of 5.7 million homes, according to overnight data by Nielsen Media Research provided by ESPN. That is a 53% increase from the previous biggest audience for the network this year, which was an average of 3.75 million homes that watched the NASCAR Winston Cup Food City 500 on April 11.

Last week, TNT and Lifetime enjoyed strong viewership levels with primetime movies. TNT's original Civil War submarine drama "The Hunley" attracted 3.2 million households at 8 p.m. Sunday to rank as the third-most-watched program on basic cable last week. Lifetime's back-to-back-to-back movies from 3-8:15 p.m. Sunday -- "Murder of Memory," "Have You Seen My Son" and "Death of a Cheerleader" -- drew audiences of 2.46 million, 2.45 million and 2.8 million households, to rank 10th, 11th and eighth, respectively.

MTV's eighth season of "The Real World" also continues to perform unusually well, with 3 million households tuning in to last week's episode at 10 p.m. July 6, ranking the program as the fifth most popular for the week.

TNN had the fourth-most-watched program on basic cable last week with the NASCAR/Jiffy Lube 300 at 1 p.m. Sunday drawing 3.1 million households.

Once again USA Network's two Monday night WWF wrestling hours were the top-ranked programs with 4.7 million and 4.3 million households at 10 p.m. and 9 p.m. July 5.

And once more, the most-watched cable program of the week wouldn't rank among the top 60 programs on any of the broadcast networks.