The 2011-2012 TV season is officially over, and the season’s No. 1 show is NBC’s Sunday Night Football, demonstrating the unwavering popularity of NFL gridiron action with American TV viewers.
According to an NFL press release, Sunday Night Football is the first sports show to hit No. 1 for an entire TV season, with an average of 25.1 million viewers.
In addition, NBC’s airing of Super Bowl XLVI was not only the season’s highest-rated TV broadcast, it was the highest-rated TV broadcast of all time, a title held for decades by the series finale of M*A*S*H until it was toppled by the 2010 and 2011 Super Bowls.
The season’s No. 2 show, predictably enough, was American Idol, which averaged about 10 million viewers (a precipitous drop of nearly 6 million from the previous season) for its Wednesday performance episodes. The Voice came on strong in its second season as the No. 3 show, followed by Modern Family (No. 4), American Idol’s Thursday results show (No. 5), The Big Bang Theory (No. 6) and Two and a Half Men (No. 7). 2 Broke Girls was the only new show to crack the top 10 (at No. 9), while New Girl also performed well, coming in at No. 12. The much-hyped The X Factor took 13th place.
The season’s lowest-rated show was the Canadians-in-Tinseltown primetime soap The L.A. Complex, which ranked 156th out of 156 shows. Meanwhile, NBC’s Rock Centre With Brian Williams, which came in at 130th place, was the lowest-rated show to be picked up for another season, and Jennifer Lopez’s Latin-themed singing contest Q’Viva! The Choice (No. 145) should be seen as a warning as to how poorly J-Lo’s non-American Idol future projects may fare.
