'Two and a Half Men' Ratings Were Huge!!

 Ashton Kutcher Debut Delivers Series High !!

     Two and a Half Men premiere ratings are in. And they’re jaw dropping. Stunningly huge.

The ninth season premiere, starring Ashton Kutcher taking over for Charlie Sheen, delivered 27.7 million viewers Monday night — that’s in the ballpark of an American Idol premiere.

      Even more impressive: The sitcom scored a 10.3 rating among adults 18-49. That’s easily an all-time high for the show, and up 110 percent over last fall’s eighth-season debut with Sheen. Everybody expected the sitcom’s first new episode back would perform strong, but not like this (see Ken Tucker’s take here). Men had the highest-rated season premiere for a scripted series since Desperate House wives premiered six years ago.

      CBS’ entire comedy lineup was strong, with the night opening with back-to-back episodes of How I Met Your Mother (11.3 million, 4.7 and 12.2 million, 5.1, respectively) that were much higher than last fall’s premiere. Following Men, new comedy 2 Broke Girls did a giant 19.1 million viewers and a 7.0 rating — down, as one would expect, from its giant lead-in, but still likely to dwarf any other new scripted series debut this fall. The only CBS show that didn’t seem to benefit from the Men surge was Hawaii Five-0 (12 million, 3.4) at 10 p.m., which was down 13 percent from last fall, yet still won the 10 p.m. hour.