How do you define what is a big TV show these days? High ratings, the number of “likes,” social-media mentions, a big press following? Best not hold your breath — or strain
your sensitive TV eyes.
Top-rated scripted entertainment TV shows -- the biggest regular schedule TV series — can be roughly around 11 million to 13 million viewers. Last season,
CBS’ “NCIS” averaged 12.6 million viewers in the Nielsen L7 measure — the top entertainment TV series. Top prime-time TV viewing has been, of course, dropping over recent
years.
But my curiosity was tweaked by a recent New York Times headline: “Can TV
Get Big Again?" It was used as a tease for “Game of Thrones,” the recently ended HBO show, which had a fanatical following.
In its eighth and final season in 2019, it
averaged around 12 million viewers, which doesn’t sound all that impressive, except in the context that HBO, the premium cable channel, only had around 40 million subscribers that year.
The most interesting data point was the illegal activity for the show: For example, the premiere of its final season episode, "Winterfell," was pirated 54 million times in 24 hours, according to
Business Insider.
Previously, we might be talking about top shows just by examining high-profile popular cultural measures, such as what shows made it onto the cover of big magazines
of the past — Time, Newsweek, etc. In this category, think about shows like “Friends,” “American Idol,” “Roseanne,” “Seinfeld,”
“Cheers” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
But the new definition of a top show? For the better part of the last decade, NBC says it has been its NFL’s “Sunday
Night Football,” averaging around 20 million viewers or so.
The new streaming environment for non-sports entertainment/unscripted TV has a different measure. Netflix’s
“Stranger Things” or “The Crown,” Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” or Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” might be in this category.
Amidst all of this, Nielsen says 20% of total TV viewing is on streaming services, with the rest coming from regular over-the-air television and cable TV networks. Yes, streaming is growing. But is
it dominating per individual TV series on a week-to-week basis? And does that matter?
Complicated questions, for sure. Perhaps no longer worth consideration in a country where popular
culture/entertainment can cater to scores of different audience groups in an exponential number of time periods and access points — all with different levels of episode consumption screened at
one sitting.
Are you looking for a singular TV entertainment series that captures the whole country’s attention at the same moment in time? I don’t see it.