Sanremo, Superbowls, and the legend of M*A*S*H
The viewing numbers for this weekend’s Superbowl LVIII are in. The estimated 123.4 million viewers have catapulted this broadcast to the top of the ‘most-watched television broadcasts.’
While this list does discount news reports (…landing on the Moon will bring in a few more million, but news events are rarely counted in these lists), the appearance of this Superbowl demotes one of the key moments of TV history. ‘Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen,’ The finale of M*A*S*H, is no longer in the Top Ten.
There have been more explosive episodes of television since then, more finales that are still discussed to this day, moments that are cultural touchstones that echo through the halls of media memories, but the ability to bring a country together at a single point in time is no longer there, at least for scripted.
Once the video recorder allowed time-shifting to take place, those days were numbered. Nowadays, the closest you get to a “everyone must watch at the same time” is the time when a streaming service releases the next episode of a show. Even then, the prevailing emotion is not togetherness but avoiding online spoilers before you can watch it yourself.
Live events continue to bring in the numbers for broadcasters. Why is it that we’ll wait until an evening or the weekend to watch the new episode of ‘Threads: The Next Generation,’ but make sure we’re sitting down to watch anything competitive immediately.
The water cooler moments of a pub landlord getting divorced, someone shooting an oil tycoon, or the end of a show about nothing are no longer there… but the audience is.
If you go by market share, then historically, M*A*S*H outperforms the current Superbowl-fuelled top ten (and pretty much everything else), thanks to its 60.2 per cent share. Of course, market share is a nice relative number that we can use elsewhere… at which point it’s not the Superbowl that defeated M*A*S*H this weekend… it was Italy’s Sanremo Music Festival, which posted a 78.8 percent share.
And let’s not get started on Iceland’s 98.7 percent share when airing the Eurovision Song Contest 2023.
Yet these are still live events, be they sports, variety, or music. What can’t be taken away from M*A*S*H is that it is the highest-rated scripted show of all time. And even if some magical numbers can be twisted elsewhere, this feels like a prize that was both earned by the audience and awarded by society.
Sports aren’t scripted. Sports are sports, and scripted is scripted. And of the two, it’s sport that is delivering for linear TV.
