Something I looked up today and found tickled my mind a bit was that of these five networks only four of them have ever had a top Neilsen rated show for a year and FOX only within the past four years.

That show is of course American Idol, but before Idol FOX never had the top rated show. For the first twenty years of the Neilsen ratings only CBS and NBC had a top rated TV show, but ABC’s first was in 1971 with Marcus Welby, M.D., which I have never heard of, but I assume is about a doctor named Marcus.

CBS dominated the early 70s and the early 80s, but The Cosby Show on NBC held the mid-late 80s and then in the 90s and 00s CBS, NBC and ABC split it up all over the place with Seinfeld, ER, Roseanne, CSI, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Home Improvement, 60 Minutes, Cheers and Friends each taking it occasionally.

What kind of surprises me is that Married With Children was never the top rated show. FOX was a young network so I understand why not, but if American Idol is appealing to a low demographic then Married With Children and a few other early FOX shows were scraping the bottom of the barrel. And American Idol is still on top even though there are 800 copycat shows all over the world these days. I didn’t know Simon Cowell was that big of an asshole.