Commentary

Super Bowl Is Still TV's Biggest Show Going Into No. LVII

As MC Hammer once sang so eloquently, “Can’t touch this.”

“This” is the Super Bowl, TV’s last juggernaut. It is the only American made-for-TV production capable of diverting the attention of an entire nation.

Audience fragmentation? That is not a phenomenon that affects the Super Bowl the way it affects everything else in the television universe.

For the four hours that the Super Bowl is on -- 6:30 p.m. to approximately 10:30 p.m. Eastern -- measurable audiences for anything else are as negligible as they will be all year.

Kickoff for this year’s game on Sunday is also at 6:30 (roughly). The Fox show that has been slotted in the coveted time period after the game is the second-season premiere of the Gordon Ramsay cooking-competition show “Next Level Chef.”

advertisement

advertisement

All told, coverage of Super Bowl LVII (57) is scheduled to consume 11-and-a-half hours Sunday on Fox, starting at 11 a.m. Eastern.

While no other event on TV has ever come close to the Super Bowl in viewership, the only other annual televised event that was once talked about in the same sentence was the Academy Awards.

For many years, the Oscars consistently attracted viewership in the 40 millions -- not Super Bowl-sized numbers, but an audience that was almost as coveted as the big game.

The Oscars hit their peak in 1998, when 57.2 million viewers saw “Titanic” win for Best Picture and unknowns Ben Affleck and Matt Damon winning their Oscars for the screenplay for “Good Will Hunting.”

Today, however, the Oscars have fallen far below that level, leaving the Super Bowl as the only true mass-audience attraction left on television.

According to online sources, the Super Bowl audience peaked in 2015 when No. XLIX (49) drew an average audience of 114.4 million.

The game was won that year by the New England Patriots over the Seattle Seahawks. The game was played in State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix.

It is the same arena where the NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles (featuring star quarterback Jalen Hurts, above photo) will play the AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs this Sunday in Super Bowl LVII (57).

While the Super Bowl has not seen an audience tally of 114 million since 2015, the numbers have remained consistent, hovering in the neighborhood of 100 million -- 103.7 million in 2018, 98.48 million in 2019, 101.32 million in 2020, 98.2 million in 2021, and 101.1 million last year.

Whether those numbers rise or fall, ad rates have risen regardless year after year, which is understandable because no other American event on TV or in any other media can provide this kind of reach into so many households at the same time.

This year’s average rate for a 30-second spot is reportedly an average $7 million, up from last year’s $6.5 million.

Raise your hand if you remember when Super Bowl ad rates crossed over the $1 million threshold. It was in 1995 for Super Bowl XXIX (29) and it was a big story. 

Thirty-second rates that year were an average $1.15 million, up from $900,000 the previous year.

But that’s the Super Bowl for you. For many, it is the Greatest Show on Earth. “It’s patriotic, it’s religious, it’s happy, it’s sad … what’s not to love about it!” John Oliver observed on the “Letterman” show in 2015.

“You have to understand how intimidating the Super Bowl is to the rest of the world,” he said, “because when you beam that around the world, everyone else is thinking: ‘If they’re capable of all of this, what else can they do’?”

Jalen Hurts photo by Drew Hallowell, courtesy of PhiladelphiaEagles.com.

Next story loading loading..