‘Trace’ rerun more popular than ‘ER’ repeat

Fans of “ER” apparently don’t make house calls in the summer.

A repeat episode of one of television’s most popular and long-running dramas was seen by barely 4.6 million viewers on NBC last Thursday.

In the same time slot, a repeat of CBS’ “Without a Trace” had 12.6 million viewers, second only to a “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” rerun as the week’s most popular prime-time program, Nielsen Media Research reported.

During the regular TV season, when first-run episodes were shown, “ER” averaged 19.5 million viewers, to 16.9 million for “Without a Trace.”

But self-contained dramas like “Without a Trace” are much stronger in repeats, and it’s one of the reasons CBS is dominating this summer in network TV. Six of Nielsen’s top 10 programs last week were reruns of dramas that tell a story that begin and end in an hour, and four of them were on CBS.

Meanwhile, the premiere of Fox’s new reality series “Trading Spouses” was the network’s second most popular show of the week with 7.5 million viewers. That could be good or bad news for ABC; Fox rushed the show on the air because ABC has a similar series, “Wife Swap,” on the fall schedule.

CBS won the week with an average of 7.9 million viewers (5.4 rating, 10 share), and beat NBC by a whisker among viewers ages 18 to 49. NBC averaged 6.6 million viewers (4.6, 8), ABC had 5.7 million (3.8, 7), Fox had 5.1 million (3.3, 8), UPN had 2.4 million (1.6, 3) and the WB had 2.2 million (1.5, 3).