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Turns out there were people watching something on TV last night besides Super Bowl XLVII. PBS’ Downton Abbey had the second-highest-rated and -viewed show of primetime Sunday. The 4.4 household rating for Sunday’s 9 PM one-hour broadcast of Masterpiece Classic‘s aristocratic British soap soundly thrashed anything else on in primetime except the Super Bowl, according to Nielsen. Down from last week’s 5.1, that household rating was still up a very strong 69% from the Downton that ran last year on Super Bowl Sunday. The series also pulled in 6.6 million viewers; the second-most-watched show on the Big Four last night after the Super Bowl was the 8 PM America’s Funniest Home Videos repeat on ABC, which drew 2.59 million viewers.
Related: Ratings For Post-Super Bowl ‘Elementary’ Down From ‘The Voice’ Last Year
The average audience of Downton‘s first five episodes of the third season is up 72% over the five first episodes of Season 2. A total of 11.1 million ultimately watched the Season 3 premiere on January 6, marking the top-rated PBS drama total ever. The season wraps with a 90-minute special February 17.
Deadline's Dominic Patten - tip him here.
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See, if you live on the left coast you can actually watch the Super Bowl and then Downton Abbey later. No muss, no fuss.
DVR, or Tivo, also works. Especially when the game goes long due to “power” outage.
Apparently the fact its already on DVD/Blu-Ray hasn’t hurt ratings…I’ve already seen the ending of Series 3….
True story, Downton Abbey benefited from events associated with the Super Bowl. People likely turned to PBS after the second half kickoff and then more went after the blackout. It was likely that Baltimore would have put together a punishing fourteen play drive that would have taken at least 12 minutes off the clock had the blackout not occurred, and then it is likely San Francisco would have committed turnovers while trying to get back into the game in the 4th, and that would have led to more Baltimore scores. As it is, the blackout caused even more viewers to flee the game.
I hope and pray that Nielsen includes the ratings for the blackout because that will tell a better picture of what happened. Overall, what happened was criminal at best and proves that the NFL is a league that stages its games just like the WWE stages its matches.