Super Bowl LIX on Sunday will bring in the biggest TV audience of the year — and, following the game, the biggest audience ever for Fox’s game show The Floor.
Those are pretty much immutable facts in the TV landscape. The Super Bowl is, by enormous margins, the most-watched single telecast of any given year. And the show that airs after it gets a big audience as well, typically placing among the top five entertainment telecasts on network or cable TV that season.
The post-game slot has been a showcase for decades, but it wasn’t always that way. In the early years of the Super Bowl, whichever network aired the game (CBS and NBC shared NFL rights back then) went to its regular Sunday night programming afterward — in three of the Super Bowl’s first four years, that meant an episode of Lassie on CBS.
Eventually, though, broadcasters figured out that some portion of the huge Super Bowl viewership would be looking for something to watch post-game, and they started programming episodes of hit series, premieres and other events in that spot. Here are the 10 largest audiences on record (with the caveat that some viewer figures for the 1970s and ’80s aren’t available).
Friends, ‘The One After the Superbowl’ (NBC, 1996)
52.93 million viewers
Friends was already a hit in its second season as part of NBC’s Must-See TV Thursday comedy block. This episode, a two-parter featuring guest stars Julia Roberts, Brooke Shields and Jean-Claude Van Damme, put the show into a new stratosphere and became its most-watched episode ever — beating out even the (almost equally huge) series finale in 2004. Even if it did mistakenly combine “Super Bowl” into one word.
Survivor: The Australian Outback, ‘Stranded’ (CBS, 2001)
45.37 million viewers
After becoming a phenomenon in its first season in the spring and summer of 2000, season two of Survivor started on the biggest possible stage. The Outback premiere is the show’s second most-watched episode ever, behind only the record-setting season one finale.
The Big Event: Kit Carson and the Mountain Men (NBC, 1977) and 60 Minutes (CBS, 1980)
42.81 million/40.75 million viewers
These two are the most successful “let’s just air regular shows after the Super Bowl” entries. The Big Event was how NBC branded its Sunday night movie at the time; Kit Carson and the Mountain Men told a story about the frontiersman, starring Christopher Connelly and The Brady Bunch’s Robert Reed. 60 Minutes was, well, an episode of 60 Minutes.
The Last Precinct, Pilot (NBC, 1986)
39.73 million viewers
This comedy-drama starring Adam West as the commander of a misfit group of LAPD officers drew a huge audience when it aired in January after the Super Bowl. Almost three months passed before the second episode aired, however, and viewers didn’t follow it. It was canceled after seven more episodes.
Undercover Boss, ‘Waste Management’ (CBS, 2010)
38.65 million viewers
The biggest post-Super Bowl audience of the 21st century tuned into the series premiere of CBS’ reality show in which CEOs and management types disguised themselves as hourly workers to see how their companies operated outside the C-suite. The show drew big ratings for a couple years before tailing off but ran for 11 seasons.
Ellen Pompeo and Sandra Oh in the 2006 ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ episode ‘It’s the End of the World.’
Peter Stone/ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
Grey’s Anatomy, ‘It’s the End of the World’ (ABC, 2006)
37.8 million viewers
A ratings halo for the post-Super Bowl show isn’t really a thing anymore, but it was when this season two Grey’s episode debuted — and arguably no show in the recent past saw a longer sustained audience boost from its post-game airing. The first part of the show’s “bomb in a body cavity” story drew a massive audience, and the show stayed above 20 million viewers — a mark it had hit only four times in 24 previous episodes — for 32 of its next 34 installments, all the way into the start of its fourth season.
The Voice, ‘Blind Auditions Part 1’ (NBC, 2012)
37.61 million viewers
After The Voice had a successful first season in the spring of 2011, NBC placed a big bet on the show for its second installment. It worked — the show stayed above its season one viewership for 10 more cycles, through the 2016-17 season.
All in the Family, ‘Super Bowl Sunday’ (CBS, 1978)
35.47 million viewers
This episode was the first post-Super Bowl show that explicitly referenced the game and its growing place in popular culture (although it also falls into the “regular programming” bucket, as All in the Family was part of CBS’ Sunday lineup in the 1977-78 season). The plot revolves around Archie (Carroll O’Connor) hosting a Super Bowl party at his bar — and two guys casing the place for a robbery.
3rd Rock From the Sun, ’36! 24! 36! Dick’ (NBC, 1998)
33.66 million viewers
The sitcom about aliens posing as humans was midway through its run when NBC decided to give it a boost by putting it on Super Bowl Sunday. The ratings halo was short-lived, however, and the show returned to its usual, middle-of-the-pack level within a couple of weeks (though it did run for two more seasons).
