Weekly Nielsen Ratings: 1985-86 TV Season

Below are the full weekly ratings results for the entire 1985-86 television season. Viewership wasn't reported by Nielsen until the fall 1988 season, so up until that point the only metric widely available was the household rating (which is what is reported here in this article). To calculate the estimated number of households watching, just multiply each rating by 859,000 as that is what 1 rating point represents. The following are newspaper clippings from The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Los Angeles Times, which were some of the only newspapers in the United States to publish full weekly TV ratings results. Note: article clippings that did not include the date for that week's ratings were edited to include the dates.

ARCHIVED WEEKS

Source: Nielsen Media Research via The Los Angeles Times & Fort Worth Star-Telegram