MagneticMediaFed

Picture via Doug Mills/New York Times

First: sorry for the untimeliness in this post, but I’ve been busy working on the site’s redesign which you may or may not have noticed. Moving on.

FOX’s broadcast of Super Bowl XLII (that’s “42″ for those that don’t read Roman) was the second highest rated television program of all time coming in behind the finale for M*A*S*H. The game was seen by an estimated 97.5 million people (M*A*S*H reached 106 million people, though at a time when most people only had access to a handful of channels). I find this to be more or less astounding. Much of what contemporary culture is based on is the notion that there are very few things rallied around by everyone, and the steady decline in network television ratings is perhaps biggest example of this (followed closely by the lack of America’s appetite to consume large quantities of popular music). To see a singular event grab such a large percentage of our collective attention spans speaks highly about the event itself as well as providing a bit of reassurance to the networks that people will turn out en mass if there’s something actually worth checking out. But what is the subtext of these numbers? Do they suggest that the solution to the network’s audience migration problem lies solely in their ability to deliver something worth seeing (because there is a lot of television worth seeing that most audiences could care less about)? Or should we read into this that the magic lies in the very scarcity of the event itself? After all, what are the odds of getting a Super Bowl where the actual game was that good? More after the jump…

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Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star publishes the ratings for the most recent late-night period. Check it out. It’s interesting. Especially the numbers for The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Adult Swim– not exactly industry shifting figures (though it is the dead of summer).

Last week was the lowest rated week for television in recorded history. The four main networks (ABC, NBC, CBS & FOX) totalled just over 20 million viewers for the entire week.

Maybe its because of the July 4th Holiday, or that all the cool new shows are on cable, or maybe– just maybe– because IT’S THE MIDDLE OF THE GOD DAMNED SUMMER! Go outside people, I’ll do the heavy lifting for you.

–Rocky from Bottle Rocket

This past weekend, the hipster punchline of the past 4 years (pirates) managed to turn itself into the ultimate in mainstream phenomena. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest brought in an astronomical $136 million, in domestic ticket sales over a three day period, shattering just about every box office record it came across. It even has a shot at tackling the domestic gross taken in by Titanic sitting at nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars. For all intents and purposes we just have to assume that Pirates of the Caribbean is going to be the premiere film franchise of the current generation. Even if it never leaves the cultural dent that Star Wars or even The Matrix did, Pirates will forever be a smash hit.

And yet for all the press and all the talk and all the energy spent on convincing people that story-based entertainment is most powerful when projected upon a screen, the sad reality is no one remembers a blockbuster. Keep reading by clicking below…

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Channel Island is reporting that last Sunday’s finale of The Sopranos was the lowest-rated finale for the series since its debut in 1999. It averaged 8.9 million viewers, or a 19% drop from the previous season in 2004.

Obviously this number doesn’t include the amount of people who did tune in to Sunday’s finale but found it boring and uneventful.