Lucy Goes to the Hospital
This episode of I Love Lucy, first broadcast on 19 January 1953, is cited here as an audience record rather than as a piece of television. In it the central character gives birth to a son, and the broadcast was timed against real life: the actress had given birth by caesarean section twelve hours before it aired, the episode itself having been filmed the previous November. The result was one of the largest shares of the American viewing public ever recorded for a single programme, at a moment when almost the only way to see it was to watch it as it went out. This vault uses it as a benchmark for what shared, simultaneous attention looked like before broadcasting fragmented, which is the comparison that makes modern audience figures legible.
This episode of I Love Lucy, first broadcast on 19 January 1953, is cited here as an audience record rather than as a piece of television. In it the central character gives birth to a son, and the broadcast was timed against real life: the actress had given birth by caesarean section twelve hours before it aired, the episode itself having been filmed the previous November. The result was one of the largest shares of the American viewing public ever recorded for a single programme, at a moment when almost the only way to see it was to watch it as it went out. This vault uses it as a benchmark for what shared, simultaneous attention looked like before broadcasting fragmented, which is the comparison that makes modern audience figures legible.
Written from the public record for the broadcast.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
broadcast 19 January 1953: 71.7 rating. Elvis Presley's first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, 9 September 1956: 82.6. Eisenhower's inauguration, 20 January 1953: 67.7. Ratings are percentages of US television households and are not directly comparable to modern viewer counts.
Where we use it
- Prime Time Never Died, It Started Charging Admission, Why We Gather
Reliability of this reference
The link below is the right work, with one detail that does not line up. No publisher or institutional page carries these 1950s household ratings. Treat as a pointer rather than as a primary ratings source. Worth opening before quoting a figure from it.