The Nielsens: November 11-17, 1985

These days, pretty much everyone walks around with a TV in their pocket, and there are so many viewing options that pretty much every show — no matter how popular it might be in the current definition of the term — is broadcast for a niche audience. But for decades, the small number of networks and the relative lack of options for rewatching anything meant that Americans watched a lot of the same stuff at the same time — and even programs that have largely been forgotten today drew what would now be considered massive ratings. In this recurring column, we take a fond and often somewhat mystified look back at the Nielsen ratings from long ago.

An Early Frost (NBC)
For a lot of Americans, the death of Rock Hudson in October of 1985 marked the first time they were compelled to think of AIDS as anything other than a far-off threat that really only impacted the queer community. This is painting with a very broad brush, obviously, but for fat chunks of the suburbs, it was genuinely true — which makes it all the more impressive that a little over a month later, NBC aired An Early Frost, starring Aidan Quinn as Michael Pierson, a closeted gay man whose thriving legal career is derailed when he finds out that his live-in boyfriend was unfaithful and exposed him to HIV.

With 40 years of hindsight, it's easy to pick at something like An Early Frost, partly because we've seen variations of this story told countless times in the interim. You know Michael's father will reject his son, only to come around in the end; you know he'll face gut-wrenching prejudice from cardboard-thin supporting characters; you know Michael will make a flamboyantly gay friend whose tragic death squeezes a few extra tears out of the audience; so on and so on. But for its time, this was fairly groundbreaking — and even a little brave on NBC's part, given how difficult it was to find advertisers for the broadcast. An Early Frost's huge ratings numbers weren't exactly a sign that America was ready to see AIDS in a less prejudiced light, but they were an early indication that the public's perspective was moving in the right direction.

Kane and Abel, Part I (CBS)
Did you know that Jeffrey Archer's 1979 novel Kane and Abel is one of the top ten best-selling books in the world? I sure as shit didn't, but it definitely explains why the first half of this TV adaptation — starring Sam Neill as the wealthy William Kane and Peter Strauss as Polish immigrant-turned-vengeful hotel magnate Abel Rosnovski — was a big ratings winner for CBS. Archer's story, which unfolds over decades and involves all manner of multi-generational intrigue, is exactly the stuff TV miniseries were made of at the time. Essentially, Abel swears an oath of vengeance when his benefactor ends his life after being denied a line of credit by Kane's bank; thus begins an epic tale that you have no doubt already guessed ends with the sort of long-delayed twist you only get out of 500-page books. Not Neill's finest hour, in other words, but still a step up from Omen III: The Final Conflict.

Hostage Flight (NBC)
In the '80s, children were taught to be afraid of kidnappers, and adults were terrified of having their flights hijacked. If I'd picked another week to write this column, we might have been treated to a kidnapping drama; instead, we get Hostage Flight, in which a star-studded cast (including Ned Beatty and Dee Wallace Stone) play ordinary folks who band together to get the better of the villains who've overtaken their flight.

This movie is pure fearmongering masquerading as aspirational drama, but it's noteworthy in at least one respect: According to this report, the network forced the producers to change their original ending, which included the passengers putting the hijackers on trial and sentencing them to death... by hanging. I'm sorry, what? Have you ever tried standing up in a plane? Unless you haven't graduated from the second grade, the possibility of anyone hanging you in a commercial aircraft is even lower than your odds of finding a comfortable seat.

Wild Horses (CBS)
By 1985, Kenny Rogers was already in the process of building a cottage industry around TV movies inspired by his own songs: Between 1980 and 1983, he starred in Kenny Rogers as the Gambler, Coward of the County, and Kenny Rogers as the Gambler: The Adventure Continues. Even after scoring a moderate big-screen hit with 1982's Six Pack, he remained primarily a TV actor — and CBS, never a network to bother placing a new bet when they could just as easily double down on a proven one, took the opportunity to put Rogers back on the range.

Unlike Coward and the Gambler movies, Wild Horses isn't a period piece. Instead, Rogers plays a retired rodeo champion who loses his job (after attaching his asshole boss' tie to a 40-pound bag of feed, which seems like a fair outcome) and decides to go back to his roots by becoming a mustang wrangler. Encouraged by his wife, who's basically just sick of his whining, he leaves her and their three kids behind to head out on a roundup, where — wouldn't you know it — he makes himself the target of a government official (Richard Masur, better than the material as per usual) while also half-heartedly fending off the advances of his rancher's daughter (Pam Dawber).

Everything about Wild Horses conforms to the worst stereotypes of pre-Peak TV televised entertainment. It relies on its star and its concept to sell itself, makes no attempt to engage the viewer beyond the inclusion of bare-minimum action and dialogue, and was clearly made with the earnest belief that it'd air once, maybe pop up for a summer repeat, and never be seen or thought of again.

They were mostly right, so... all's well that ends well, I guess?

The Insiders (ABC)
Consistently running a distant third in the ratings, ABC spent the mid-to-late '80s vacillating between trying to expand on what little they had in terms of proven formulas (Dynasty II: The Colbys) and taking wild swings that occasionally paid off (Moonlighting), but more often didn't, at least as far as the Nielsens were concerned (Max Headroom). The Insiders belongs squarely in the former category: a transparent Miami Vice clone, right down to the production company, it starred David Cronenberg mainstay Nicholas Campbell as the ridiculously named Nick Fox, an undercover reporter whose assignments indubitably exposed him to all sorts of neon-lit danger.

It isn't like ABC skimped on the budget — The Insiders' theme song was Genesis' "Just a Job to Do," which had to have cost a hefty sum all by itself — but one Miami Vice-style show was enough for viewers. After briefly flirting with the lower reaches of the Nielsen Top 40, it plummeted into obscurity, soon to join the ignominious list of series to have their final few episodes burned off during the summer. One last fun fact before we forget The Insiders forever: Campbell's main co-star was Stoney Jackson, a prolific "that guy" whose biggest claim to fame at that point was probably being the guy whose appearance in the "I Can Dream About You" video fooled millions of kids into thinking he was Dan Hartman.

Lady Blue (ABC)
As we've seen in previous editions of this column, the '80s had absolutely no shortage of steel-jawed, no-nonsense tough guys roughing up perps in their single-minded pursuit of justice. Vigilantes ruled the day, so when ABC decided to put a distaff spin on the genre with Lady Blue, I'm sure they figured they were smartly filling an underserved gap in the robust market for shows about crooks having their skulls cracked.

They should have known better. People couldn't get enough of Hunter and the like, but as soon as word got out that Lady Blue lead Katy Rose had been taking lessons in Hollywood crimefighting from Clint Eastwood, pearls were clutched with white-knuckled fury. Rose had already filmed supporting roles in a pair of Eastwood productions and no one really batted an eye, but the idea of a woman kicking bad-guy ass, at least on the small screen, provoked moral outrage.

Of course, Lady Blue also wasn't a great show. If it had been, all that notoriety would have produced ratings gold; instead, the show languished in the lower reaches of the Nielsens throughout its run, which started with Rose's character dashing out of a pedicure to foil a bank robbery, killing several of the would-be robbers, and going back to finish getting her nails done. Thirteen episodes later, Lady Blue was off the force.

North Beach and Rawhide (CBS)
Not content to let Kenny Rogers hog all the saddle-backed glory, William Shatner — then riding high as the star of T.J. Hooker, previously featured in this space — clip-clopped into double duty as the lead in North Beach and Rawhide, a rather ridiculous-sounding movie about a guy who starts a cowboy camp for urban delinquents.

Please understand that I'm not calling the concept of this two-part movie ridiculous, or at least no more ridiculous than any of the other TV movies that dotted the schedule during this sadly bygone era. I'm mainly taking issue with the notion that anyone would be interested in — or able to take seriously — the idea of Shatner as a sort of behavior-correcting cowpoke, let alone one who's also an ex-con named Rawhide MacGregor.

Both installments whiffed miserably in the ratings, to the extent that North Beach and Rawhide has left little in the way of a footprint on the internet; based on the exceedingly minimal amount of research I'm willing to do right this minute, I can find no real reason for a Shat-led feature to get clobbered by episodes of Airwolf and The Love Boat. Here, watch this clip and see if you can spot young Chris Penn and Tate Donovan:

The Execution of Raymond Graham (ABC)
Remember what I was saying about ABC taking wild swings? Well, here's The Execution of Raymond Graham, a two-hour live event dramatizing the countdown to the state-administered death of the titular convicted killer (Jeff Fahey). It's an interesting idea for a TV movie, in terms of narrative as well as, uh, execution, and you can't argue with the cast, which also featured Josef Sommer (then still riding the afterburners of his villainous turn in Witness), Laurie Metcalf (knocking on Roseanne's door), and Morgan Freeman (God). Unfortunately, this was a swing and a miss for ABC; The Execution of Raymond Graham came in just about (ahem) dead last, even losing to a largely ignored George Burns special, which had the unintentionally humorous effect of producing a Nielsens list that read GEORGE BURNS' COMEDY EXECUTION OF RAYMOND GRAHAM.

Shadow Chasers (ABC)
For a few scant weeks in the fall of 1985, it was a great time to be a viewer of paranormal-themed television. Aside from Amazing Stories and the Twilight Zone revival on CBS, you had NBC's Misfits of Science, starring Dean Martin's kid, the guy who played Predator and Harry from Harry and the Hendersons, and a pre-Friends, post-"Dancing in the Dark" Courteney Cox as a group of crime-fighting superpowered goobers — and over on ABC, there was Shadow Chasers, about an uptight anthropologist who is roped through ridiculous means into solving a series of supernatural mysteries with the aid of a flamboyant reporter.

None of these shows were hits, but of the bunch, Shadow Chasers is the least-remembered by far. Of the 14 episodes that were produced, only ten aired — via ABC, anyway; for some reason, the other four were broadcast on the Armed Forces Network. Just about the only noteworthy thing about this show is that the reporter was played by Dennis Dugan, who went on to befoul late-period Moonlighting episodes before becoming Adam Sandler's favorite director. If Shadow Chasers had only stayed on the air for 15-20 seasons, we might have been spared all that.

Our Family Honor (ABC)
Of all the ABC flops we're covering in this particular column, I think Our Family Honor is probably the one that should have been a hit. It was the story of two families whose longtime friendship was severely complicated by the fact that one clan, the Danzigs, was made up of a bunch of mobsters, while the other, the McKays, included a bunch of NYPD cops. Just think of all the drama that might have ensued if this show hadn't sloughed its way off the schedule after 13 episodes! Why, ABC could have had a regular Blue Bloods on its hands!

Alas, it was not to be. On the bright side, Our Family Honor's quick cancellation freed up cast members Michael Madsen, Eli Wallach, and Ray Liotta to move on to bigger and better things.