America’s Longest-Running TV Shows—How Much Time Have You Invested?

Shows like General Hospital, Saturday Night Live, and The Price is Right have spanned generations with loyal fans who still catch new episodes even though the shows premiered over 40 years ago. The beloved children’s show Arthur is about to turn 25 this year, meaning many kids who watched the show in the ‘90s are now able to tune into new plot lines with kids of their own. 

Watching each episode of these and other long-running TV shows is no small feat (we’re looking at you, Days of Our Lives fans who have seen all 14,000+ episodes). With this in mind, the team at GetWindstream, an authorized reseller of Windstream, used an IMDB list of the 20 longest-running TV shows that are still on air and calculated the total amount of time that loyal fans dedicate to the top long-time programs.

Dig into the data

• General Hospital first aired 58 years ago and has aired nearly 15,000 episodes. Since the original air date in 1963, we’ve seen cell phones go from a mere thought to a computer in our pockets.
• By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, nine of the currently-active shows were well established.
• While Grey’s Anatomy is newer than Family Guy, Arthur, South Park, and SpongeBob SquarePants, the show has more than double the amount of airtime to date, clocking in at 15,621 minutes.
• It’s said that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in a topic—by that standard, dedicated Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless, and General Hospital fans can all consider themselves soap opera masters.
• The average American works 1,801 hours per year, which is fewer hours than Wheel of Fortune, The Bold and the Beautiful, Jeopardy, The Price is Right, The Young and the Restless, Days of Our Lives, and General Hospital have been on air.
• SpongeBob SquarePants has the shortest total time to watch of all the series we examined, but you’ll still have to dedicate over a month consecutively to watch every episode.

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