Britney Spear’s guest shot spiked viewership by almost three million

By Matthew B. Zeidman

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 3/26/08 – Britney Spears has always had a talent for drawing a crowd, and her recent court troubles and other public debacles haven’t robbed her of that ability. The pop singer’s Monday night guest shot on “How I Met Your Mother” scored nearly three million extra viewers for the CBS sitcom.

An estimated 10.6 million people tuned in to see Spears, 26, play a ditzy medical receptionist with a crush on one of her boss’ patients, according to Reuters. The show had been averaging 7.8 million earlier in the season. Also guest-starring was Sarah Chalke of “Scrubs” fame.

This was Spears’ first small-screen acting appearance in nearly two years. In 2006, she played a closeted lesbian talk-show host on the popular NBC sitcom “Will & Grace,” and in 2005, she starred in a five-episode reality show with her then-husband, Kevin Federline, on UPN.