Popularity of TV Shows in the USA

In the United States the popularity of TV shows are measured by Nielsen Media Research. They measure the number of people watching television shows and make their data available to the television and cable networks, advertisers and the media. Nielsen publishes every week the top ten shows on TV and Cable that you could see in our TV Rankings page.

Nevertheless in this post we would like to talk about the most popular shows in the last few years. As we all know it is very difficult for a show to keep the popularity for many consecutive years. There was a time that we thought that America Idol would dominate the ratings as long as it was on the air. After winning the rating for several years, by season 2011-2012 the show started its rapid decent in rating. During the season 2014 -2015 the show did not make the top 25. Even with that drop in popularity American Idol is one of the top 5 TV shows of all time.

The case is different for the most popular TV series at the moment, NCIS. In the first four seasons the show barely made the top 30, but by the sixth season it became a top 5 hit, a position it have kept since 2011. And its popularity looks like it will continue in the 2016-2017 season.

We created the table below to show the ratings for American Idol and NCIS since the 2007–2008 season. More details here.