Talk:Top-rated United States television programs by season

Weekly ratings
Anyone looking for sourcing information for weekly ratings, please see List_of_US._television_ratings_archives.--Milowent • hasspoken 16:09, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Why doesn't this include cable shows? Tsunami3 (talk) 10:45, 17 May 2018 (UTC)


 * It does include cable shows, but cable does not draw enough viewers to reach the top 30. (Average rating for a new cable show  is around 2.0)   Theaveng (talk) 16:36, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
 * It doesn't include cable shows. The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Monday Night Football on ESPN should definitely be here, and probably Downton Abbey, Duck Dynasty, etc.

It is hard to find Nielsen ratings for these cable shows, but they definitely belong on the list as it is currently. Suggestions to fix it: Change the name to "network" shows only, or switch to total viewers or 18-49 ratings as proposed below.

Household-Rating Figures Post-1997 to Change to Viewers?
It's clear that all of the figures used in this page are household ratings provided by Tim Brooks and his "Complete Directories of Primetime Broadcast TV Shows". But household ratings started to become meaningless after the late 1990s (for example, in the late 2010s, a U.S. broadcast-TV program can barely crack the 10.0 level). Which is why I propose that the broadcast TV ratings tables on this page after the 1997-98 season need to be changed to viewership figures (in millions). There is simply no need for household ratings after 1997. And I guess the "Multiple Rankings in the Top 30" section needs to be changed, also, because programs that ranked in the Top-30 in terms of viewers may not rank in the Top 30 in terms of households, and vice versa. Jim856796 (talk) 21:46, 19 November 2020 (UTC)