Reception
During the shows first three seasons, The A-Team managed to pull in 17% to 20% of the American households on average. The first regular episode ("Children of Jamestown"), reached 26.4% of the television watching audience, placing fourth in the top 10 rated shows, according to the Nielsen ratings. By March, The A-Team, now on its regular Tuesday timeslot, dropped to the eight spot, but rated a 20.5%. During the sweeps week in May of that year, The A-Team dropped again but remained steady at 18.5%, and rose to 18.8% during the second week of May sweeps. It was the highest ratings NBC had achieved in five years., During the second season "The A team" continued to soar reaching third place in the twenty highest rated programs, behind Dallas and Simon & Simon, in January (mid-season). while during the third season was only beaten out by four other NBC shows, including The Cosby Show.
The fourth season saw The A-Team experience a dramatic fall, as it started to lose its position while television viewership increased. As such, the ratings, while stable, were relatively less. The season premiere ranked a 17.4% (a 26% audience share on that timeslot) on the Nielsen Rating scale, but after ratings quickly declined. In October, The A-Team had fallen to the 19th and by Super Bowl Night had fallen still to 29th the night on which the show had originally scored its first hit three years before. For the remainder of its fourth season The A-Team managed to hang around the 20th spot, far from original top 10 position it had enjoyed during its first three seasons.
After four years on Tuesday, NBC decided to move The A-Team to a new timeslot on Friday for what would be its final season. Ratings continued to drop, and after seven episodes, The A-Team fell out of the top 50 altogether with a 13.3 Nielsen Rating. In November 1986, NBC cancelled the series, declining to order the last nine episodes of what would've been a 22-episode season.
The show's seasonal rankings and audience were as follows:
- Season 1, 1983: #10 – audience 16,743,300
- Season 2, 1983–1984: #4 – audience 20,112,000
- Season 3, 1984–1985: #6 – audience 18 593 100
- Season 4, 1985–1986: #30 – audience 14,517,100
- Season 5, 1986–1987: #53 – audience 9,361,000
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Famous quotes containing the word reception:
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—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)