The preliminary Nielsens are in for the second night of Fox's "American Idol," and they're only slightly less spectacular than Tuesday's, with the show averaging 36.86 million viewers over two full hours of mostly embarrassingly bad singers from Seattle.

Which until Wednesday night, you probably thought of as a hot music town.

Anyway, numbers like this -- and Tuesday's 37.3 million viewers -- are why CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler -- crediting her NBC counterpart, Kevin Reilly -- is this morning referring to "Idol" as "the Death Star."

Tassler, however, is also dropping CBS' pre-"Idol" 18-49 success into every other sentence, something we wouldn't have heard at a CBS press conference in earlier years, when the network instead spent huge amounts of time trying to persuade reporters (and advertisers) that 25- to 54-year-olds were far more important consumers than 18- to 49-year-olds.

Tassler insists the network contains to care about all demographic groups, but there's little question that CBS' attempts to deny Madison Avenue reality did far less for the bottom line than attracting some younger viewers has.