For purposes of comparison continuity, numbers come from the tvseriesfinale.com website.
A TV show has a series finale Sunday. You might have heard about it. It’s “last show that everyone watches at the same time” (in 2017!). It’s “the last show we watch together.” It’s “the last great blockbuster TV show.” The networks devoted time to talking about an accidental prop. The Huffington Post wanted to know why a character didn’t pet his pet goodbye. It’s presumed well-enough-known that there was a crossover Super Bowl ad with a mass-market beverage.
It’s also very much not my cup of tea, as watching one of the more infamous sequences on YouTube had me nope-ing out fast. (Plus, I’m poor.) But after being unable to escape the fawning over yet another non-network show about not-nice people, or at best anti-heroes, doing not-nice things, there’s only one thing to do: Blog a complaint.
“Game of Thrones” is averaging nearly 11.5 million viewers per episode of its last season, and who knows how many via streaming. (I’m going to have to ignore that last part for this.) That is, to be sure, a large number nowadays, and especially for premium cable.
You know what show hasn’t had fewer than 11.5 million viewers an episode this season, over three times as many episodes? “NCIS,” a traditional crime procedural. It’s a show on a network, with higher expectations and demands than cable. (It, too, is a show I do not watch.) But have you seen anything about it on Vulture, the AV Club, or anywhere the supposedly cool kids congregate? The most popular show overall is “The Big Bang Theory,” which has gotten a few this-show-is-ending pieces for its 12 years — and a thinkpiece from Vox about how much many people hate it.
But the difference is in that second column of the ratings. “Thrones” crushes it in the 18-49 demographic. “NCIS” does not. That means that people who talk about television on the Internet are more likely to see the former. (The latter? Well, those viewers are more likely to vote. The subtext is left as an exercise for the reader.)
There are so many thinkpieces about “Thrones” out there that the Ringer ginned up a paragraph to linking to points and counterpoints about whether this season was good or even competent, including some from its own website. The only thinkpiece ever written about “NCIS” was in May 2014, in the Atlantic, pointing out that no one writes thinkpieces about “NCIS.”
This isn’t the first time this has happened, although it could be the last depending on how this “peak TV” thing sorts out. The final season of “Mad Men” on basic-cable AMC averaged over 2 million viewers in its last season, and 3.37 million the season before. Time magazine wrote at least three articles about the series finale, not counting the cover story that ran beforehand. In 2014-15, “Forever” on ABC averaged more viewers and was cancelled as a ratings failure. (Those same numbers today would make it around the network’s sixth-highest scripted show.)
Ratings aren’t everything, maybe only barely anything, when it comes to what gets written about. But when someone says the end of “Thrones” is the last time “we” watch TV together, the response should be, “What do you mean we, whippersnapper?”
