@soapfan770 Thanks for posting 1996 Super Bowl week.

1995/96 not a very good season. ER reaches #1 and Friends blows up. The rest of the broadcast network primetime lineups that weren't NBC Thursday, not looking so good.

On 2/2/2026 at 11:02 PM, kalbir said:

@soapfan770 Thanks for posting 1996 Super Bowl week.

1995/96 not a very good season. ER reaches #1 and Friends blows up. The rest of the broadcast network primetime lineups that weren't NBC Thursday, not looking so good.

No it wasn’t overall was it?

We all know CBS was the biggest MESS. It’s biggest nights were Mondays and I guess Saturdays at this point? Oddly CBS canceled the Nancy McKeon & Marissa Hargitay sitcom Can’t Buy Me Love after one season despite breaking into the Top 30, but it just didn’t hold onto the Nanny audience leading into Murphy Brown.

ABC was a checkered board mess. An aging yet still decently rated Tuesday night while TGIF was hanging while shows like Lois & Clark moderately thrived in its own corner. ABC threw around a bunch of new sitcoms but nothing worked.

Outside of NBC’s Thursday night lineup, things looked either decent (Frasier on Tuesdays, L&O on Wednesdays) or they looked rough.

Fox soaps were beginning to age and decline. The X-Files gained a lot of momentum, but the rest of the network’s established hits were trending downward.

UPN and WB both cellar dwellers.

There wasn’t any real breakout hit. Drew Carey show premiered but wasn’t a hit yet. JAG premiered and was cancelled. Shows like Can’t Buy Me Love, Hudson Street and The Naked Truth showed promise but were quickly cancelled or moved instead of trying to let their ratings grow. Caroline in the City was just a timeslot hit. I guess there was 3rd Rock from the Sun but that ended up a being more of a wacky show with a cult following than a mainstream hit.

1 hour ago, soapfan770 said:

No it wasn’t overall was it?

I posted this article about 1995/96 earlier. I've quoted it this time in case the link has a paywall.

Who Lives and Who Dies on TV - The New York Times

The end of the calendar year marks the midpoint in the television season, the time when network programmers assess what has gone well, what has gone less than well and what went south.

Among other things, those assessments tell them what holes they need to fill for shows that have been canceled. This year the holes are plentiful, and few of the reinforcements are producing high expectations. NBC will add a comedy about an alien family. ABC has a comedy about a former high school basketball team, the first effort from the Dreamworks Studio. CBS has a high school drama that could be Montel Williams's vehicle out of daytime talk shows. And Fox has a comedy about a woman trying to make it as an executive among lumberjack-types in Alaska.

The networks badly need a glimmer from these new efforts, or from a couple of the holdovers from fall, because with the exception of two well-positioned new shows on NBC, "Caroline in the City" and "The Single Guy," almost nothing new from the fall rang any bells in the ratings.

"Caroline" and "Single Guy" have placed among the top six shows on television, but the significance of their ratings are questionable because NBC scheduled them in its powerhouse Thursday-night lineup, which includes "Friends," "Seinfeld" and "E.R."

In spite of the doubts, those two comedies have at least held onto the big audiences delivered to them.

ABC, by contrast, has a batch of new shows, including "Hudson Street," "The Naked Truth" and "The Drew Carey Show," which are steadily losing viewers from the hit shows they follow. The network has renewed them, however, though with no noticeable enthusiasm.