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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.
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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.
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Where the frek was Dallas?
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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.
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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."
"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."
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A YEAR IN THE LIFE was fantastic!
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Sanford & Son WAS a Norman Lear show.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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It always takes me by surprise to see RHODA and PHYLLIS out-ranking MARY TYLER MOORE on these ratings recaps. I've only seen pieces of the two spin-offs, but I've seen enough to know that MARY TYLER MOORE was certainly the better show.
And then to see shows like BOB NEWHART, THE JEFFERSONS, and CAROL BURNETT so low.
I don't know.
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This ratings list above does not denote whether the individual shows were first-run or repeats. Granted, most shows started new seasons in late September, but not all shows started their new seasons at the same time. Networks would occasionally premiere all their shows in stages rather than all at once. The networks were often counter-programming new shows against the older, established shows in an effort to cut the older show's audience, but the audience would reject many more shows than they embraced. Audience "sampling" of new shows is usually a temporary hiccup. By November or December many of the new shows had faced the judgment of the network, who either cancelled them outright or moved them into safer slots to give them a better chance of survival.
Oh, and if you want to see how terrible some of the new shows were back then, find clips of #66. The Montefuscos and try to make it through more than a few minutes.
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This was the first week of the 1975/76 season. And many of the shows -- THE JEFFERSONS, MASH, etc... --- were at the top of the ratings in 1975. So why so low this particular week?
Well, there were a lot of popular, hit shows at the time, so one assumes that despite their superficial rankings, some of which appear "low" here, their actually headcount numbers were probably petty close together, and closer than the week's rankings might suggest.
So, by the end of the season, the year-long average would make a little more sense.
PS: in 1975, the size of the television audience collectively, when the three networks still dominated, was nearly at its largest.
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1975-76 Top-Rated TV Shows
RANK | SHOW | NETWORK | ESTIMATED AUDIENCE |
1. | All in the Family | CBS | 20,949,600 |
2. | Rich Man, Poor Man | ABC | 19,488,000 |
3. | Laverne & Shirley | ABC | 19,140,000 |
4. | Maude | CBS | 17,400,000 |
5. | The Bionic Woman | ABC | 17,330,400 |
6. | Phyllis | CBS | 17,052,000 |
7. | Sanford and Son | NBC | 16,982,400 |
8. | Rhoda | CBS | 16,982,400 |
9. | The Six Million Dollar Man | ABC | 16,912,800 |
10. | ABC Monday Night Movie | ABC | 16,843,200 |
11. | Happy Days | ABC | 16,634,400 |
12. | One Day at a Time | CBS | 16,077,600 |
13. | ABC Sunday Night Movie | ABC | 16,008,000 |
14. | The Waltons | CBS | 15,938,400 |
15. | M*A*S*H | CBS | 15,938,400 |
16. | Starsky and Hutch | ABC | 15,660,000 |
17. | Good Heavens | ABC | 15,660,000 |
18. | Welcome Back, Kotter | ABC | 15,381,600 |
19. | The Mary Tyler Moore Show | CBS | 15,242,400 |
20. | Kojak | CBS | 15,172,800 |
21. | The Jeffersons | CBS | 14,964,000 |
22. | Baretta | ABC | 14,824,800 |
23. | The Sonny & Cher Show | CBS | 14,755,200 |
24. | Good Times | CBS | 14,616,000 |
25. | Chico and The Man | NBC | 14,476,800 |
26. | The Bob Newhart Show | CBS | 14,407,200 |
27. | Donny and Marie | ABC | 14,407,200 |
28. | The Streets of San Francisco | ABC | 14,407,200 |
29. | The Carol Burnett Show | CBS | 14,268,000 |
30. | Police Woman | NBC | 14,059,200 |
I'm surprised THE JEFFERSONS finished out of the Top 20 for the 1975-76 season, as it had been hitting at around Number One the previous summer of 1975.
Also, the "estimated audience" column on the right is misleading, probably giving you the "household" numbers. If, say, ALL IN THE FAMILY pulled a 28.0 rating, that would translate to roughly 42 million viewers in an individual week.
But they don't always know how to read these old numbers today. When Larry Hagman died a few years ago, ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT (whose hosts probably didn't know who he was) swooned that the "Who Shot J.R.?" audience pulled a massive "40 million viewers" -- when in fact the DALLAS episode pulled a record 53.3 rating and a staggering 76 share, equating to 83 million American viewers (to say nothing of the 300 million viewers worldwide who saw the installment -- and conventional wisdom says to always double those numbers). The "40 million" likely applied to "households."