Random TV Ratings

[ClassyCo]

 

[bmasters9]

On that 1972-73 chart, Gunsmoke was apparently still doing well in 9th place, that being its 18th season.

 

[ClassyCo]

On that 1972-73 chart, Gunsmoke was apparently still doing well in 9th place, that being its 18th season.

For a show with a twenty-year run on primetime network television, GUNSMOKE retained solid Nielsen ratings practically all the way through. Thirteen of those seasons were spent inside the Top 10, nine of those were in the Top 5, and from 1957 until 1961, it was the #1 show on the air. Even when it fell to #34 in 1967, that still wasn't that bad for a show twelve years old, and it quickly rebounded and regained a large percentage of its audience when CBS shook-up its schedule and moved GUNSMOKE from Saturdays to Mondays for the 1967-68 season.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

For a show with a twenty-year run on primetime network television, GUNSMOKE retained solid Nielsen ratings practically all the way through. Thirteen of those seasons were spent inside the Top 10, nine of those were in the Top 5, and from 1957 until 1961, it was the #1 show on the air. Even when it fell to #34 in 1967, that still wasn't that bad for a show twelve years old, and it quickly rebounded and regained a large percentage of its audience when CBS shook-up its schedule and moved GUNSMOKE from Saturdays to Mondays for the 1967-68 season.

Even when it was in its 20th season, the first half of the year saw GUNSMOKE appear in the Top 5 for the week occasionally, the ratings drooping in the last half of the season when Leonard Katzman left midway through, and show's tone changed... When it was cancelled in 1975, James Arness attributed it to "demographic horsefeathers" (i.e., the audience was getting grey around the temples). So the team went over to ABC and did HOW THE WEST WAS WON, which was a hit... GUNSMOKE could have run another 5 years.

When it ended, it was the longest-running live-action scripted series in American primetime history. And when that record was tied or surpassed decades later, it was in an era where you needed only one-tenth the audience to be regarded as "a hit" and be easily renewed.

 

[ClassyCo]

 

[ClassyCo]

 

[ClassyCo]

 

[Toni]

View attachment 59440

Where the frek was Dallas?

 

[ClassyCo]

Where the frek was Dallas?

The list doesn't have DALLAS, KNOTS LANDING, or FALCON CREST, so I guess they hadn't started their seasons yet. Based on the dates at the top, this may have been a reruns list.

 

[Daniel Avery]

Yes, the nighttime soaps took the summers off. You can't rerun soap episodes because it confuses the viewers who aren't bright enough to notice it's a rerun.

"Oh, man, they shot JR again? He was just shot a few months ago. In that same office. Wearing that same suit. Oh, these writers have no imagination."

 

[Jock's Ghost]

A YEAR IN THE LIFE was fantastic!

 

[Jock's Ghost]

View attachment 57350

These ratings here give a good representation of what was happening to the face of primetime TV in the early 1970s.

Long-time favorite GUNSMOKE was still placing strong at #18 for the week, but the majority of the Top 20 shows were a brood of new fare created in the wake of the "rural purge" and the overall shake-up at the TV networks at the start of the 1970s.

MARY TYLER MOORE and BOB NEWHART were both in the Top 10, while more politically aware comedies like ALL IN THE FAMILY and MAUDE were at #1 and #4, respectively. Still, American viewers enjoyed more wholesome offerings, like THE WALTONS, which placed #5 for the week.

More progressive, diverse sitcoms, like SANFORD AND SON, were also drawing big numbers, coming in at #3 here. Funnily enough, I always think of SANFORD AND SON as a Norman Lear show.

On the flip side, shows like HERE'S LUCY didn't even make the Top 30 here (it's #33 for the week), which I guess is fitting considering this was its final year. More youth-aimed sitcoms, such as THE BRADY BUNCH (at #36) and THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY (at #61), also shocked me.

Sanford & Son WAS a Norman Lear show.

 

[Daniel Avery]

I think we covered this before, but I'm not sure....
Norman Lear either owned or co-owned Tandem Productions, the company that produced S&S, but after helping launch the show he handed over show-running duties to someone else. Since S&S was a remake of a British show, his was more of a developmental contribution than creating. He still had input because his company signed the checks, but he wasn't as involved as he was in many of his other shows.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

Where the frek was Dallas?

Yes, the nighttime soaps took the summers off. You can't rerun soap episodes because it confuses the viewers who aren't bright enough to notice it's a rerun.

"Oh, man, they shot JR again? He was just shot a few months ago. In that same office. Wearing that same suit. Oh, these writers have no imagination."

Yes, by the mid-'80s, they stopped rerunning the nighttime soaps in the summer because the ratings just cratered. Audiences would rewatch an episode of a crime show or sitcom they'd seen 6 months earlier, but were reluctant to sit through a multi-episode story arc they'd just seen 6 months earlier.

But as Paulsen told this approximate website in 2008, networks pay to show an episode twice, so even when the soaps were still doing well, they were probably bleeding money for those networks. And once the ratings for the genre drooped, they were in even more trouble... ABC slashed DYNASTY (a show they knew mostly sucked and had wanted to get rid of for years) in 1989, while CBS was still trying prop up DALLAS even after it dropped out of The Top 60.

Go figure.

 

[Daniel Avery]

I vaguely remember KL trying to make some money off reruns during the summer hiatus between S9 and S10 (I think). To cut down on the chances of confusing viewers, they had several of the actors (I recall Lynne Moody in the mix) film "introductory" scenes on a set resembling an editing room where they discussed what that night's encore episode was going to be about.