IN JEOPARDY

Chaos Is Normal Now

Happy Monday Peaceniks! Ready for some TV time travel? Let’s go!

In 1975, Pay TV was just being born. On TV, most of America watched just three Broadcast networks, or one of a few locally-run stations with cartoons, westerns, and reruns. The number one show in the country was All In The Family - which brought in an average of 62 million people every single week, twenty-two weeks a season, to watch Archie and Meathead argue out cultural issues of the day.

In 1975, the top ten shows in the country reached more than a half a billion people. These weren’t unduplicated viewers, but still; A HALF A BILLION PEOPLE reached with just 10 TV shows. Working class, rich, black, white, young, old, rural, urban… In 1975, nearly everyone in America watched some combo of those ten Broadcast shows.

These weren’t just series, they were meeting places. TV was the national hearth that America gathered around, then chatted about the next day, in playgrounds and around water coolers across the nation, with one, common language. That’s how Archie and Edith helped us discuss feminism, Maude helped us debate abortion, how M*A*S*H helped us end the Viet Nam War.

Here are the top ten Broadcast shows from the week of March 10, 2025.

The total reach of today’s top ten Broadcast shows is 60 million: Just 11% of the 555 million total audience for the top ten of 1975; Smaller, combined, than the weekly average of either All In The Family or Sanford & Son.

It is fascinating to see, fifty years later, how CBS continues to dominate mass TV. The major difference between these ten shows and the top ten from Bunker’s time? Not only that far fewer people watch these shows, but that a small community of the same people watch all of them, over and over and over. CBS shows are not everyone’s shows any more. At least on the TV, these stories play for a shrinking, monolithic Broadcast bubble. Broadcast is now a niche.

Look at the top ten shows on Pay TV for the week of March 10, 2025.