M*A*S*H Finally Gets Taken Out By A Super Bowl
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
The ratings results are in for Super Bowl XLIV and not only did it garner HUGE viewership, but it actually dethroned the final episode of M*A*S*H as the most watched program in television history. Via Sports Media Watch....
The Saints' 31-17 win over the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV drew a 45.0/68 fast-national rating and 106.5 million viewers on CBS Sunday night, up 7% in ratings and 8% in viewership from Steelers/Cardinals on NBC last year (42.0/64, 98.7 mil), and up 4% and 9%, respectively, from Giants/Patriots on FOX in '08 (43.1/65, 97.4 mil).
Saints/Colts ranks as the most-viewed program in U.S. television history, topping the previous record of 106.0 million for the series finale of M*A*S*H in 1983.
Additionally, the 45.0 rating is the highest for any television program since Cowboys/Steelers drew a 46.0 in 1996.
To put the numbers in perspective, the Super Bowl drew over 70 million more viewers than the top non-NFL sporting event of the past 12 months -- the Texas/Alabama BCS National Championship Game (30.8 mil).
8 Comments:
More telling was the fact that this record-setting number was not even most of the American people. (MASH drew almost 2/3 of the country for the finale - it was just a smaller country.)
TV audiences are getting more and more fragmented, but as long as we keep procreating the advertisers should still be happy.
TV audiences are getting more and more fragmented
Not the 94 million people that "follow NCIS."
What happened to the college basketball schedules you used to do? Always enjoyed those.
uh, I'm pretty sure the country had way more than 159M people in 1983. So either 2/3 is wrong or the 106M in the blurb is.
The US had 203 million people in 1980.. so in 3 years you can add a few million onto that. So 106M wouldn't be 2/3, but would still be over half the country.
I know we've veered off topic here, but actually...
"The Twentieth United States Census, conducted by the Census Bureau, determined the resident population of the United States to be 226,545,805, an increase of 11.4 percent over the 203,184,772 persons enumerated during the 1970 Census"
So it was less than half.
That 227M was the 1980 number.
Manning Failure is always such an attractive draw.