James Hibberd has the run down on the top 10 most-watched individual telecasts of the 00's for regular series (excludes special events like Super Bowl and Olympic viewing), and not a single one of them happened since since we launched this site in September 2007 and only one happened after 2006 (American Idol season premiere in January '07). Check out the full list on THR.com.
Interesting list. Blame the writers’ strike.
Love the fact that “Spin City” was on that list – how random is that?!
And looking at Survivor as #2 really brought back some memories…that first season of the show was really quite something
Soooo happy that Friends is number 1 for their series finale! It is the best show ever made. I have seen every episode a gazillion of times and they never get old!
Andrea, blame cable.
And while everyone knows that every Super Bowl would out rate all of these entertainment shows, many, if not most, of the AFC and NFC championship games from the past decade would be above most of these shows.
friends sucked, especially the last few seasons where everybody went out with everybody for no reason
No Dollhouse?
Glad to see ER made the list. What a prolific ratings champ it was during it’s heyday, not to mention a top quality show. RIP Michael Crichton.
Friends was a Three’s Company rip-off x 2. Everybody Loves Raymond was original and good from beginning to end.
It really shows you the stark contrast between all the critics’ lists of best shows of the ’00s (in heavy rotation: The Wire, Mad Men, Deadwood, among many other low-viewership shows) and the things most people actually watched. Kind of depressing, actually.
That list is missing 2 shows:
After SBXXXV 2001 CBS — Survivor II 45.369.
After SBXXXVIII 2004 CBS — Survivor All-Star 33.535.
romo: it said excluding duplicate titles.
Two series that have the potential for big finales this decade:
Lost (people who gave up earlier on checking to see how it ends)
HIMYM (people wanting to see who the mother is)
Those were happier days at NBC. I’m a huge Friends fan and seeing it at number one is great. Watching that last scene was also great.
Bill, that too, but was there a dramatic increase in cable viewers in the months during and after the writers’ strike, as opposed to a steadier increase in the preceding years?
Why was the last big show in the spring season of 2007? Why could no show increase its viewers (with the exception of NCIS) after 2007?
It seems to me to be a correlated relationship.
I didn’t realize Joe Millionaire was that big before LOL
I like Lost but I don’t see it getting very huge finale numbers, I’m guessing 18 million for the last episode
ER and Grey’s Anatomy are the only two shows on that list that I watched…
I can’t see the Lost finale getting huge numbers like that either. Hasn’t Lost been declining a bit every year? It looks like all the shows on that list were already hit shows when they got those numbers — the ER ep on that list is an ep that aired at the height of its popularity, not the ER finale.
The sad thing is, we’ll probably never see a show get ratings like those ever again. I can’t imagine any show on right now having a big enough episode to get over 30 million viewers barring NCIS following the Super Bowl this year. The continued growth of cable and other forms of entertainment as well as new ways to watch TV have pretty much killed the possibility of tens of millions of people coming together to watch the series finale of huge shows like Friends, Fraiser, or Everybody Loves Raymond, and now that reality is no longer new and exciting I doubt we’ll see any more huge events like Borneo’s finale, either.
I’ll be shocked if the biggest audience for any show will go above 35 million in the next decade.
Lost finale, will probably get something like 30m, if it’s lucky. How I Met Your Mother finale will get 20m if every other TV channel AND the internet ALL die for the half hour/hour that Mother is on. None of the shows today compare to the quality and the amount of fansbase shows in the 90s got, thus why shows like Fraiser, ER, Friends and Raymond all got 30m. If NCIS airs after the superbowl it will probably get 35-40m, but remember some of those people will probably just leave their TV on after the superbowl and forget to turn it off. I doubt anything will top the Friends and Survivor-post Superbowl episodes, both of which topped 50m. Never again will we have a TV show where astronomical amoutns of people will flock to see the episode,
Who Shot J.R?
Lucy Goes to the Hospital
Friends – The Last One
Stuff like this doesn’t exist anymore… unfortunately.
I guess TSCC’s finale didn’t make the list?
And after all the work Lanie and I did to promote it!
NCIS or The Big Bang Theory will make the list from 2010-2019 if either of them air after The Super Bowl.