... But neither Ms. Couric nor Mr. Gibson can beat out Judge Judy (pictured, below), at least when it comes to the local ratings in the 5:30 p.m. time slot.

We are talking, of course, about the May ratings, released last week. We already gave you the local TV news numbers, but it's interesting to chart the progress (or lack thereof) of CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric.

Couric has bombed nationally in her nine months as Dan Rather's replacement. Indeed, the show's ratings have reached all-time lows and there's talk in the media-industry publication TVWeek that CBS president Sean McManus will face hell from affiliates when he speaks to them this week in Las Vegas.

"They're not going to like being No. 3, but they've been very supportive, with a lot of them going seamless into the `Evening News' and promoting it a lot," McManus demurred in the TVWeek article. "They're not being impatient. I've heard nothing from any affiliate at all about disappointment in the numbers."

But as it turns out, viewers in Sacramento don't hate Katie as much as those in the rest of the country. Of course, they don't love her like they love Brian Williams, whose NBC Nightly News spanked both CBS' Couric and ABC's Gibson (who is No. 1 nationally). The reason for that, we suspect, is that its "lead-in" show, Channel 3's 5 p.m. news, dominates its time slot.

Here are the raw numbers for 5:30 p.m. (Quick refresher: Ratings chart the percentage of all homes with television; shares measure the number of TV sets turned on at a particular time.):

1. NBC Nightly News (Channel 3): 9.5 rating, 19 share.

7. That '70s Show (My58TV): 1.1, 2