‘Murder One’ Challenge To ‘Er’ Dominance Fizzles

The long-awaited confrontation last Thursday at 10 between NBC’s “ER” and ABC’s touted “Murder One” was a total bust, at least if you get your mail at ABC.

The very slight good news for ABC was that “Murder One’s” national Nielsen rating in its debut as a Thursday night regular was up 18 percent over the 7.0 averaged by a variety of ABC News hours in that time slot in the first three weeks of the season.

The bad news was that “Murder One” did only an 8.3/14, by far its lowest ever (after averaging a 13.4/22 during three weeks in “NYPD Blue’s” Tuesday night slot) while “ER,” with a 24.7/40, drew perhaps its second-largest household count ever in the brief history of the medical drama (“ER” did a 25.3/41 on this year’s season premiere Sept. 21 and had averaged a 24.3/40 this fall before meeting “Murder One” last week).

Worse, for the numbers-crunchers at ABC, “One’s” ratings among the advertiser-coveted 18-49 adults crowd dropped from a three-week average of 8.2 to just 3.5 on Thursday.

‘Real World’ pegs Miami

MTV has renewed “The Real World” for a fifth season. The program, which has followed young adults living together in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and London in the first four seasons, will move its base to Miami for season five.

There, seven young adults will be asked to create a business in addition to sharing a loft and will have to rely on their own sources of income as the business gets going.

MTV is currently looking for seven adults between the ages of 18 and 26 from the ranks of business management graduates, street-smart entrepreneurs, computer whizzes, creative types and sales people to make up the cast. The hotline for casting is (818) 505-7795.