The largest audience in U.S. TV history gathered Sunday night to watch the Green Bay Packers win the Super Bowl, a bigger audience than last year's Super Bowl and bigger than the long-standing champ, the 1983 finale of "M*A*S*H."
Nationally, the game averaged 111 million viewers, with a total of nearly 163 million people watching at least a part of the game. Last year's Super Bowl had 106.5 million, the end of "M*A*S*H" had 106 million.
Some 538,000 southeast Wisconsin households were tuned to Channel 6 for the game, an 85 percent share of TVs on at the time, according to Nielsen Media Research overnights. Channel 6 says that's the biggest audience for a Super Bowl in the Milwaukee market.
That's no surprise, of course, since it's the first Packers Super Bowl since January 1998.
That darn "M*A*S*H" finale still scored a slightly higher rating in Milwaukee than Sunday's Super Bowl win --- a 61 rating/75 share --- while Channel 6's airing of Fox's Super Bowl coverage averaged a 59.7 rating/85 share.
Channel 6 was a CBS affiliate in those days and that rating doesn't translate into quite as big a raw number, thanks to population growth in this TV market.
The rating, by the way, is the percentage of all TVs in the market, the share is the percentage of TVs on at the time.
Naturally, the biggest television audience here in Milwaukee came from 9 to 9:15 p.m. Sunday, as the exciting game came to an end. In that final quarter-hour, the Super Bowl had a 64.7 rating, with an 89 share.
That means an incredible 89 percent of the TVs that were turned on in southeast Wisconsin were watching the Packers' win, according to the overnight ratings.
That shows just what a shared event the Super Bowl was in southeast Wisconsin.
In case you're wondering, Nielsen doesn't measure overnight ratings in Green Bay, so we don't yet have a handle on viewing in Titletown.
But we do know what was going on in Pittsburgh. The game averaged a 59.7 rating/87 share -- the same rating, but a slightly higher share of TVs on at the time.
So there's a slight edge for Steelers viewers.
Looking back at the previous two Packers' Super Bowls, the 1997 Super Bowl (a Packers' win) averaged a 59.5 rating/80 share, and the 1998 Super Bowl (a Packers' loss) averaged a 54.3 rating/82 share, according to Nielsen numbers.
On TV: Speaking of the Packers, Channel 4 is airing the "Return to Titletown" festivities from Lambeau Field at 4 this afternoon, with a prime-time special at 7 p.m. The current plan is to join the two-hour "Biggest Loser" in progress, at the end of the special.
- And, speaking of ratings, the 26.8 million that Nielsen estimates were watching Fox's post-Super Bowl "Glee" makes that show the biggest scripted TV show in three years, according to the Hollywood Reporter's Live Feed blog.
- Milwaukee TV threw the switch Monday and Channel 36 is now airing in high-definition, just like sister station Channel 10.
- Michelle Obama visits "Live with Regis and Kelly" at 9 a.m. Wednesday on Channel 12.
- CNN's Anderson Cooper will visit CBS' David Letterman at 10:35 p.m. Wednesday on Channel 58 to talk about what happened to him while covering the protests in Egypt.
- The CW will bid farewell to "Smallville" in a two-hour series finale May 13.
- FX has ordered a third season of "The League."
- Kurt Warner, a veteran of both the Super Bowl and ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" tells PopEater.com that Brett Favre should go on the dancing competition to rebuild his image.
What editing can do: The NFL's Super Bowl spot featuring classic bits of TV was one of the rare highlights of the ad lineup.
But here's an interesting look at the original versions of the clips that were used, alongside their digitally edited versions:
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
