That wasn't a Super Bowl. That was a super Super Bowl.
A record 97.5 million people, on average, witnessed Sunday's perfect storm of a game, featuring an undefeated team in the New England Patriots, a gritty little underdog team from the nation's number one TV market in the New York Giants, and a competitive battle that saw the decisive touchdown scored with only 35 seconds to go.
Also, the beer commercial with the Dalmatian and the Clydesdale was cute.
The game's performance marked the eighth time the 41-year-old Super Bowl had passed the 90 million viewer mark, and the third time it'd done that in the last three years. But it was the first time the game surpassed 95 million. And it blew away the previous all-time high of 94.1 million that was generated by a 1996 marquee matchup of the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers.
In the game's last full hour, 9-10 p.m. ET, it averaged a whopping, sorry, a phenomenal 103.3 million, per Nielsen Media Research.
Viewing was most rabid in Boston, home of the Patriots, where 81 percent of all TV sets in use were tuned to the game—the day's saddest statistic, come to think of it.
Overall, an estimated 148.3 million watched some, if not all, of Super Bowl XLII—another record.
For those keeping score at home, there are 303.1 million people in the entire United States.
In the annals of TV history, not just Super Bowl history, the game goes down as second only to the 1983 finale of M*A*S*H*, which averaged 106 million for an event that, honestly, wasn't as much of a nail-biter.
Aside from the Patriots-upending Giants, Fox was the night's big winner.
It had the game, it had the eyeballs, it had a postgame House that scored 29 million viewers, and it got some genuine raves for its game coverage. The well-timed use of a shot of Giants quarterback Eli Manning tossing an end-zone pass to receiver Plaxico Burress during practice was frequently cited as a standout—it mimicked the Manning-Burress connection that won the game. Announcers Joe Buck and Troy Aikman got good notices, too.
- "'Wow!' for Fox's booth, too," declared New York's Newsday.
- "Like Giants, Fox delivers," headlined the San Diego Union Tribune.
- "Fox allowed the game to tell its own story," said the Dallas Morning-News.
Critics were more critical of the pregame entertainment, hosted by Ryan Seacrest. The main gripe was that Fox devoted too much time to, well, Fox.
"No network can get a multihour pregame show right, and Fox didn’t," the New York Times judged, "thanks to turning it into an American Idol promotion with Seacrest as a cohost at the red carpet and Paula Abdul in a taped performance."
Tom Petty's halftime performance was said to have been carried out with "workmanlike efficiency" by the Los Angeles Times, the mildest sort of review that probably suited the Janet Jackson-skittish NFL just fine.
As predictable as a solid Petty set, the commercials got good, and bad, reviews. (Fox, which pocketed a record $2.7 million for every 30 seconds of ad time, presumably loved each and every one.)
Budweiser's Rocky-aspiring spot with a Dalmatian prodding a Clydesdale to new heights was cited as the most popular commercial in USA Today's annual Super Bowl ad survey.
Other big hits, per the paper's rankings: the FedEx spot with the monster-sized pigeons; and the Bridgestone tire ad with the screaming squirrel.
A trailer for the upcoming Iron Man movie went clank, and landed in the survey's bottom five, as did spots for a hybrid GMC Yukon, Under Armour athletic wear, the White House's anti-drug campaign and, in the cellar of cellars, Doritos' songwriting contest.
As the Patriots could attest, nobody's perfect.