Hundreds of millions of people will settle in front of their TVs on Sunday with their buffalo wings and light beer and watch a live television event, maybe the only one they’ll watch all year. The Super Bowl is a cultural anomaly: no reality show finale, no awards show, no State of the Union address, not even another sporting event comes close to the broadcasting Mount Olympus upon which the Super Bowl sits.
In a landscape of infinite streams of content vying for our limited attention, the Super Bowl is exceptional in its sustained prominence. Year after year it seems to break its own viewership record. Last year, it was by far the most viewed television program, bringing in more than 120 million viewers, more than double the second most viewed — another football game, the NFC Championship. And the most watched non-football live event? That would be the 2024 Presidential Debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris, with a comparably paltry 20 million viewers. And it’s not even worth it to talk about the state of theatrical movie releases. Football is nothing less than legacy media’s life support, sustaining the heartbeat of a geriatric industry.
Using the Super Bowl’s viewership number as a gauge for the overall health of network television is like using Cristiano Ronaldo’s medical records to gauge the health of the average human. Every year, on the second Monday of February, TV dies, only to be revived seven months later for the opening kickoff of the next year’s NFL season. For many of us, the Super Bowl is a reminder of why we don’t watch network TV anymore: the incessant commercials, the inability to pause or fast forward, the expensive cable plans with hundreds of channels you’ll never watch. Did I mention the commercials? The Super Bowl is the best of what live TV has to offer, but it’s still a constant reminder of the myriad failings of an industry that stubbornly refuses to change.
120 million viewers sounds impressive when viewed in a TV vacuum, but let’s expand to other mediums. Adding streaming, there are a few titles that inch their way closer to matching the Super Bowl’s media supremacy: the third season of “Bridgerton” brought in about 92 million viewers, and season one of the British crime drama “Fool Me Once” drew in an impressive 107 million. But that’s not the entire story. People watched “Moana” on Disney+ for 13 billion minutes last year — which, based on the runtime, would translate to over 125 million viewers. Mount Olympus has company.
Social media gives us an even more dire frame of reference for the prognosis of network TV. As of April 2024, TikTok accumulated more than 1.5 billion monthly active users, while Facebook commanded the eyes of nearly half the world. The Super Bowl doesn’t seem that impressive anymore, does it? 120 million viewers? LeBron James’ Instagram is more popular than that, with 159 million followers. Of course, there is a difference between pressing the “follow” button and watching a three-hour sporting event — which, let’s face it, you’ll probably be on Instagram for most of. But in the arms race for our attention, social media leaves even the biggest televised events in the dust.
As social media becomes more attuned to our tastes and interests as Netflix, Twitch and YouTube pump out hours upon hours of endlessly streamable content every minute, why do millions more people every year tune in to watch football, a nauseatingly commercialized injury-fest? It speaks to something we have lost in our world of individualized entertainment and algorithmic consumption: community and tradition.
I’ve spent the bulk of this article ripping apart the seeming impressiveness of a football game’s popularity, but think about how truly spectacular the Super Bowl is. Over 120 million people, equal to the population of Japan, at exactly 6:30 p.m. EST, sitting around a TV — yes, a real TV, that big black box you use as background noise while you scroll through Instagram Reels — and actually watching something together. No Netflix show or YouTube video or visual slop fed to you on a TikTok “For You Page” will ever be able to deliver the same elusive joy of large-scale, shared entertainment.
The Super Bowl’s incongruously increasing viewership tells us of our yearning for tradition and collective experience as we are inundated with shifting trends, AI-generated content and relentless consumerism. The Super Bowl isn’t immune to these factors by any means, but it remains one of our only constants — a reassuring American comfort. Enjoy it, revel in the shared experience of watching giant people ram into each other for three hours, and if you find yourself reaching for your phone, acquiescing to a more rapid stream of stimulation once the commercials start, maybe watch those, too. Half of Instagram is just ads anyway.
