These days, the popularity of a television show is not measured in quite the same way as it used to be. Instead of taking note of the amount of subscribers logging in to stream a certain TV show from the internet, previous decades saw TV network executives take note of how many households were tuning into a program the moment it was actually airing. Now, to be fair, this remains a common practice to this day, but with streaming being the dominate form of home entertainment viewing, it is certainly not main method of determining a series’ success now.
So, we decided to look several decades in the past and find which television programs would prove to be the most popular in every broadcast season from 1970 to the present. In order to do that, we had to use the old school method and look up the average ratings that the most-watched titles from a given period time achieved. You may find that some of the most popular TV shows of the last 50-plus years managed to take home the gold multiple years in a row, as you take this trip down memory lane.
