Vintage numbers

You scrape up the funniest things on the game show Interwebs.

An oldies fanatic on Game Show Forum - that board has a lot of oldies fanatics - found this 1978 article about daytime ratings. The king of the hill was Family Feud, when Richard was still in his pomp. This was before Dawson faded away into mumbling and boredom in the mid '80s.

Nowadays the most watched show in daytime TV is, of course, The Price is Right. But TPiR was nothing special back then, according to Nielsen. Its two half-hours ranked 15th and 19th among 27 rated shows in daytime. The second half-hour was the highest rated game show after Feud, though. I just assumed that Bob Barker always rode higher in the numbers. The soaps were really big in 1978.

Match Game had started to fade, though it still got respectable numbers by game show standards. CBS would can the network version in 1979. Chuck Woolery's Wheel of Fortune was NBC's best game show, though nowhere near the dominant force it would eventually become in syndication.

Those were the days when the broadcast networks strode the earth like behemoths. Broadcast ratings of all sorts have shriveled enormously since the '70s. If anything in today's daytime TV got a 9.1 rating and a 38 share like Feud did in 1978, it would be the mega-hit to end all mega-hits.

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