Super Bowl LVI didn’t break any records on Sunday but it did bring a lot of viewers and sports fans.
What’s interesting is that it killed off an average of about 100,000 viewers from cable shows like “Euphoria” and “Billions,” setting them back into the 200,000 range. The episodes of those shows will have a lot of delayed viewing this week.
The match between the LA Rams and Cincinnati Bengals brought in 99.1 million pairs of eyes officially, close to 100 million total. Everything worked: the game was exciting and close, the halftime show was a knockout, the commercials were all hits especially the news that Meadow and AJ Soprano are alive and driving a Chevy, and that Larry David was happy to sell out to some bitcoin thing that no one understood.
The result of all this was high numbers in the key age groups, making the network and ad sales people very, very happy. They won the game, not the Rams. And the fall off at 10:24 pm gave the Winter Olympics on NBC 21 million viewers who cried, in unison, “The Olympics are still on? What?”
Also, as I wrote yesterday, all the performers from the halftime show have sold a boatload of music in the last 48 hours on iTunes and other platforms.
