For Your Eye Only

TUBE TALK A little more than two weeks after he was booted off the show he created 32 years ago and has hosted ever since, financial news guru Louis Rukeyser has a new home. The creator and former host of PBS' ''Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser'' found out last month that his producers at Maryland Public Television wanted to revamp the show by having the 69-year-old share the anchor desk with younger folks, editors from Fortune magazine. He grumbled about the plan on the air during his March 22 broadcast and was promptly fired. Now, however, he's landed at CNBC, where his new weekly show, ''Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street,'' will debut on April 19. (To make room, CNBC will cut its talk show ''America Now'' from an hour down to 30 minutes.) Like his PBS program, it'll be supported by underwriters instead of commercial-buying advertisers. It'll also air on Fridays at 8:30, opposite his old show, now to be called ''Wall $treet Week with Fortune.'' He'll also make it available for free to PBS stations that want to carry it, as early as midnight following its CNBC airing. Hmm, think Lou carries a grudge?...

In this week's Nielsen race, NBC had a slight edge over CBS on Thursday, with No. 1 show ''ER'' (28.5 million viewers) and ''Friends'' (22.6 million) coming out slightly ahead of main CBS rivals ''CSI: Crime Scene Investigation'' (26.8 million) and '''' (22.2 million). But CBS won the week overall, thanks to some unlikely help from the Maryland Terrapins, whose NCAA basketball championship victory over Indiana last Monday drew 23.7 million viewers, and Celine Dion, whose Sunday night special was also a ratings winner. Still, the race was a squeaker, with CBS averaging just 30,000 more viewers for the week than NBC (12.66 million to 12.63 million). Not even in this race were third-place ABC (8.23 million), Fox (6.88 million), UPN (3.88 million) and the WB (3.12 million).

BABY TALK ''ER'' doc Laura Innes has a new daughter, and she didn't even have to stay in the maternity ward. She did, however, have to go to China -- that's where she and husband David Brisbin (he played Dr. Babcock on the show for three seasons) went to adopt a baby girl they've named Mia, New York magazine reports. The couple already have a son, Cal, 12.

PASSING NOTES Nobu McCarthy a Japanese-American actress who had bit parts in Hollywood before doing pioneering work in television and theater, died Saturday of an aortal aneurysm at age 67. She had small roles in movies throughout her career (from 1958's ''The Geisha Boy,'' opposite Jerry Lewis, to ''The Karate Kid Part II'' in 1986). She turned to the stage and joined East West Players, the first Asian-American theater group, and ultimately served as its artistic director. On TV, where she did a lot of guest work, she starred in the 1976 movie ''Farewell to Manzanar,'' one of the first projects about the internment camps where the U.S. held thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II. She was at work on a film called ''Gaijin II,'' on location in Londrina, Brazil, when she suffered her fatal seizure on the set. The movie, which costars Tamlyn Tomita (''The Joy Luck Club''), has suspended production.