Whether it was the allure of Indianapolis Colts star quarterback Peyton Manning, the underdog New Orleans Saints or the commercials, Super Bowl XLIV went down as the most-watched program in television history.
CBS’ broadcast of Sunday’s game scored big for the network, bringing in an estimated 106.5 million viewers to supplant the finale of “M*A*S*H,” which had been the top-watched show since 1983 after drawing in 106 million viewers, according to preliminary results from the Nielsen Co.
Last year’s Super Bowl match-up between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals attracted 98.7 million viewers.
“The Super Bowl remains the premier television event of the year, and is one of the few programs in an era of fragmented TV viewership that can still attract a huge national audience,” Dave Thomas, Nielsen’s president of media client services, said in a statement.
With a household rating of 45 percent, Super Bowl XLIV was the highest-rated Super Bowl since 1996, when the Dallas Cowboys defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers to become the first NFL team to win three Super Bowls in four years.
Locally, WBZ-TV (Ch. 4) had 2,378,500 viewers.
The results were not surprising, even though TV audiences have become more fragmented along with an industry that’s grown from three networks to include 300 cable channels, said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for the Study of Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
“Once upon a time, during the network era, we were all feeding from the same cultural trough,” Thompson said. “That’s now completely changed. However, there’s still this appetite to share the same cultural glue, and it seems like the Super Bowl is the one that gets to survive.”
Super Bowl Sunday has become a national holiday of sorts that secures it from the audience erosion that’s hit other televised events from the Olympics to Miss America, according to Thompson.
“The idea of having or going to a Super Bowl party is like having or going to a Thanksgiving dinner,” he said. “It’s a thing we do as a nation. even as the Internet continues to penetrate, and there are more and more cable channels, I think the Super Bowl ratings are pretty secure for quite some time, and I would not say that about any other programming genre.”