Word: nielsens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Airplane! alumnus Leslie Nielsen plays Lieutenant Drebin, who sets out in the tried and true cop show quest: avenging the attempted murder of his partner. The first half hour of the film is inspired, from the hilarious credit sequence to Nielsen's first scene, in which he foils an anti-American plot by some of America's most notorious enemies such as Muammar Khaddafi and Idi Amin. The attempted killing of Nielsen's partner (O.J. Simpson) is a slapstick tour-de-force...
Naked Gun's script thrives on the same groaner puns and absurd hyperbole that distinguished Airplane! When the movie's villain, played with oily elegance by Ricardo Montalban, offers Nielsen a cigar he says, "Cuban?" "No," replies Nielsen, "I'm Dutch-Irish." Montalban's dignified demeanor is a perfect foil to Nielsen's hapless bumbling...
Priscilla Presley plays Montalban's innocent assistant, whom Drebin describes as having "the kind of legs you'd like to suck on," and is appropriately appealing as Nielsen's love interest...
...machines, exotic and expensive toys just ten years ago, have found their way into 60% of American homes, according to Nielsen. A study by Paul Kagan Associates, a California-based research firm, found that the typical VCR household rents 4 1/2 movies a month, and such viewing has almost certainly cuts into network ratings. More insidiously, the VCR -- and its high-tech sidekick, the remote-control unit -- has encouraged a new, more active method of TV viewing known as "grazing." A survey published last month by Channels magazine found that 75% of all TV homes have remote-control buttons...
...this has helped depress the numbers that networks live by. A decade ago, the benchmark of prime-time success was a Nielsen rating of 20. (The rating refers to the percentage of total TV homes that are tuned in to a particular show. The "share" refers to the percentage of homes watching TV that are tuned to that show.) In the 1980-81 season, 28 network series achieved a 20 rating or better; last season only nine did. For many weeks last summer, not a single network show cracked the 20-rating level...