Weekly Nielsen Ratings: 1996-97 TV Season

Below are the full weekly ratings results for the entire 1996-97 television season. There are four different sets of data posted below and there is a chart at the bottom of the post to help make clear what types of data are available in each of the season's 53 weeks. The first document includes clippings from the USA Today which have HH rating/share and viewership to 1-decimal place for every show of the week. This data was previously posted over at the TVAholics blog; however, the links are dead, so I've decided to post them here so they are at least available somewhere on the internet. USA Today clippings were not available for the weeks ending Dec. 22, 1996 updated with hand-typed chart, Mar. 9, 1997, or Apr. 13, 1997, so HH ratings are provided from Broadcasting & Cable Magazine.

The second document includes weekly viewership results to 2-decimal places. From w/e Sept. 22, 1996 through w/e Dec. 29, 1996, two-decimal viewership data is only available for the top 20 shows and comes from the archives of UltimateTV.com (note: the documents say "households" but the numbers are actually total viewers/persons 2+). Beginning with the w/e Jan. 5, 1997, two-decimal viewership is available for every broadcast program and comes from the Los Angeles Times. The third document includes the weekly top 50 basic cable ratings from Broadcasting & Cable magazine, but there are a few scattered weeks in which only the top 15 basic cable ratings were available. The final document includes the weekly top 5 pay cable ratings (essentially just HBO) and they are available for 45/53 weeks. Utilize the "+" icon to zoom in on any pages that are difficult to read.