Both CTV’s eTalk Daily and Entertainment Tonight Canada on Global claim to be the number one entertainment news show in Canada, though a closer look at the numbers says the race is too close to call.

Last week both networks released season-to-date ratings, each claiming its daily entertainment magazine drew 479,000 viewers (national average 2+) for the period of Jan. 1 to April 1. Each says the other trailed by between 25,000 and 34,000.

‘When you get audiences that are that close together, it’s hard to project a winner,’ BBM Nielsen Media Research spokesman Tom Jenks tells Playback Daily. ‘The station groups that CTV is using to generate its numbers and the station groups that Global is using are slightly different, and that’s why they’re coming up with different numbers,’ he explains.

Global’s account of the numbers includes only 16 of the 21 CTV stations that air eTalk Daily, Jenks says. Fair game, the way he sees it, though the numbers are nonetheless too close to declare a winner.

In other programming, CTV got a head start on midseason programming when it rolled out the two-hour premiere of Drive, the action drama about a secret cross-country car race, on Friday, April 13 at 8 p.m and 9 p.m. ET to 612,000 and 532,000 viewers, respectively. Not bad, considering the show aired here two days ahead of its U.S. debut on Fox.

CanWest’s CH network (newly rebranded as E!) was to debut Painkiller Jane last Saturday, but moved the Canuck-made sci-fi to Thursdays at 10 p.m. beginning April 26, where it will air opposite CSI on CTV.

Leading up to its highly anticipated season finale on May 17, Grey’s Anatomy continues its stranglehold on the Thursday 9 p.m. ET timeslot, pulling 2.4 million viewers to CTV on April 19, opposite Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? on Global. The season finale will double as a pilot for a spin-off, Private Practice, wherein star Kate Walsh leaves Seattle Grace Hospital for Los Angeles.

In sports, the Toronto Raptors’ first NBA playoff berth in five years drew 330,000 viewers to TSN for game one against the New Jersey Nets, on Saturday. It was the eighth most-watched NBA game ever on TSN.