Thanks to the excellent ratings its game show Deal Or No Deal is pulling in, NBC is enjoying its highest audience rating in the 8pm time slot to date. The show is hosted by 1980s favorite Howie Mandel, now without the famous plastic glove…or his hair.

NBC notes that both shows compare favorably to the early days of ABC’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” which averaged a little better than 10 million viewers in its first two airings in August 1999. That show, of course, developed into a runaway hit before ABC’s over-reliance on it—it aired four nights a week at its peak—helped send the network into a tailspin from which it took several years to recover.

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