Size

      Let me tell you how it used to be. This is going to sound like I’m 100 years old and telling you about “what it was like in my day, Sonny,” but it’s not. It was fairly recent. The Fame in the ’80s and ’90s was the tail end of the “concentrated audience Fame.” Imagine a time without cable TV as you know it, where the Big 3 networks rule. NBC, ABC, CBS. Nothing else matters. There are smaller local stations that play game shows, talk shows, and the reruns of the Big 3 shows. You have HBO in there, but it plays movies that were released in theaters a few years ago (“Home Box Office,” get it?). CNN has just started (1980) and Showtime comes along in 1983. So, cable is basically one station trying to fill 24 hours with news every day and a couple of channels playing movies you’ve already seen. The Big 3 networks were where it was at. And you had to watch the shows when they aired. Recording shows on videotape on your VCR was pretty new, and unless you were good with the VCR timer, it was a virtually useless way to catch your favorite show if you were away from your TV that night. No, this was “appointment television.” You’ve heard that term. So, appointment television and no Internet. Yeah, can you imagine? No 500 channels on cable and no Internet. (Whatever would you do with yourself if you were dropped into 1982 right now?)

      OK. No Internet, a few cable channels, and video games were super basic; you went to an arcade if you wanted to play video games. It was the Big 3 networks. That was it. The Big 3 and the movie theaters. So think about it; if you were an actor on a TV show on one of the Big 3, you were IT. People would rush home from work to catch the show that everyone was going to talk about in the office the next day. You miss the show and you are not part of the conversation tomorrow. No watching an episode on your DVR or binging on the whole season later on Netflix. There was none of that. So, people would not miss their favorite show. They would watch it when it aired. That’s weird now. I mean now, I don’t know what nights or times my favorite shows are on. Do you? My DVR just grabs them or I find them online later. But back then, everyone made sure they were in front of that TV when the shows aired.

      Let’s do the math. That translated into an average of 26 million people watching any one of the top three or four TV shows during the 1980s. Every single week. Think about this: the top TV show right now has numbers that would have had it cancelled after its first episode had it aired in the ’80s. “Ratings” tell you the percentage of people who had your show on, out of ALL the people who own a TV. The TVs that are turned on and the TVs that are off that night. The “share” is the percentage of people, or “households,” who had your show on, out of all the people who were actually watching TV that night. Family Ties had a 32.7 rating at its height, meaning 32.7 percent of all Americans who owned a TV set (practically every household owned one) had the show on every week during that period. Maybe there’s one person in front of each TV, maybe there are four. The population in the US then was about 242 million, so that’s about 62 million people watching. Every week. That’s getting close to modern-day Super Bowl numbers, you see? Look, I don’t want to saddle you with a lot of math, I just want to show you how concentrated the TV audience was back then. The top shows now: Modern Family, say, or The Big Bang Theory, are pulling in a 2.3 rating or a 3.4 rating. You got a population here now of 324 million, so that’s 7.4 million or 11 million people watching those shows each week, respectively. These are the top-rated shows. Low numbers. Millions more people watched one night of a TV show in the ’80s than watch an entire season of some 2017 shows. That’s because the audience now is fractured, all over the place. 500 cable channels, more TV channels, TV series still being made on the Big 4 (there are four now), but now also on HBO, Showtime, A&E, AMC, FX, etc., etc. Movies still in the theaters, but video games in the home. Lots of choices. You can’t get those big TV ratings numbers anymore unless you are the Super Bowl.