Ashton Kutcher - Two And A Half Men Garners Year's Biggest Audience

The season premiere of CBS's Two and a Half Men , in which Ashton Kutcher made his debut and Charlie Sheen's character was killed off, attracted nearly 28 million viewers Monday night -- the biggest audience for any scripted television show this year. Although it lost 31 percent of its lead-in, the series premiere of CBS's 2 Broke Girls wound up with 19.15 million viewers, beating out the season premiere of the always-strong Dancing with the Stars on ABC, which averaged 18.72 million viewers. Against such potent competition NBC and Fox each averaged slightly more than 5 million viewers. The poor showing must have been especially bitter for struggling NBC, which had been heavily promoting its 10 00 p.m. drama The Playboy Club , whose series debut managed to attract just 5 million viewers versus 13.6 million for ABC's Castle and 12 million for CBS's Hawaii Five-0 , in the same time period. Earlier, a two-hour edition of NBC's The Sing-Off averaged just 5.2 million viewers.