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Ratings from the 70's


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Thanks for posting. Hope you have more.

That was really the end of an era

Early 78  AW at #1 ATWT at #2. Within months AW had tumbled and GH taken over dominance of the 3pm slot.

Surprising that ATWT began to drop as nothing really changed in terms of storytelling or characters. It just seemed like viewers suddenly found ATWT not to their liking and switched off.

Look at The Doctors ahead of Days. 

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Thanks for these ratings.  All My Children beginning its rise to Number 1 for the 78 to 79 season and finishing Number 3 in the 77 to 78 season.

 

Interesting to see Another World and As the World Turns as well as AMC battle it out for Number 1 and within the top 3 spots.

Also Shocking that Ryan's Hope is higher than General Hospital. GH was slated for cancellation by Fred Silverman until Gloria Monty saved it.

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Agnes Nixon saved Another World from being canceled in the late 1960s and it rose to No. 2 in the ratings defeating General Hospital in the time slot.

 

When ABC saw what Agnes Nixon did with AW and what happened to GH, ABC approached Nixon to create a soap for ABC....One Life to Live debuted in January 1968 and Nixon finished up her headwriting duties at AW.  Then based on OLTL's performance, ABC wanted another soap. Agnes presented All My Children to ABC and the rest is history.

 

AW was near the top of the ratings from the late 1960s until its collapse in 1979 with GH's giant rise.

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Late 1970s was ABC huge rise and P&G shows tanked. Did viewers suddenly switch over from P&G to ABC, or did ABC get a whole bunch of new viewers?

Y&R was going strong in the late 1970s but would stumble in 1980 after expanding to one hour and changing time slots.

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Surge of new (mostly younger and college aged) viewers flocked to ABC especially to GH. Yes Y&R was strong but expanding to an 1 hour and then the changing time slots stymied its progress. The same thing happened to All My Children. When Ryan's Hope premiered in July 1975, ABC gave RH AMC spot at 1 and moved AMC to 12:30. AMC's ratings slightly dipped and AMC's progress slowed. It was until January 1977 that AMC got its 1pm slot back and RH to 12:30 that AMC ratings got back to where they were and in April 1977 AMC went to an hour and the ratings went much higher.

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Thank you so much. Love all of this, even for soaps I'm not into, love the 70's regardless so this is gold.

Interesting ABC chose to air a 13min episode of OLTL - not sure why they didn't just pre-empt it

GH doesn't air its first 1 hour ep Jan 16 but the following day which must have been annoying as I assume ABC promoted it a fair bit. 

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Days is an interesting case. It's three most definitive eras are the Bill Bell years, the supercouple years, and Reilly's sci-fi years. The years in between each of those definitive eras are not really remembered it seems.

Late 1970s/early 1980s ABC set the template that Days took to a whole other level in the supercouple years.

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