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If you thought Roseanne’s live and same day ratings were huge, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. It turns out the premiere episode stirred up more than just controversy: it stirred up the largest-ever total viewer Live+3 increase rating of all time.
A quick explainer: the Live+3 rating measures how many people watched the episode within the 3-day span after its premiere. That number, we now know, is 6.59 million viewers added to the premiere’s already massive numbers.
That’s a bigger lift than anything else seen this TV season, including the post-Super Bowl episode of This is Us (which only increased 5.72 million). In fact, it’s bigger than any L+3 ratings lift in history; the previous record holder was the series premiere of ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder in September 2014, which gained 5.94 million.
Including the three days of delayed viewing, the average viewership of the Roseanne premiere has increased from 18.45 million (it’s live + same day viewership) to a whopping 25.04 million. It’s the second-most-watched telecast of the season, after only that post-Super Bowl This is Us. Heck, no comedy has been watched by that many people since February 2, 2014 when New Girl followed the Super Bowl. The new Roseanne beat that without the help of a Super Bowl lead-in.
Even crazier is that this blockbuster-sized rating is big even compared to the monster ratings shows regularly got back in the ’90s, before the rise of the internet and streaming. The last time an episode of Roseanne was watched by this many people, it was a season 7 episode aired in January 1995!
The bump is also remarkable when you drill down to the adults 18-49 demo. In that case, the +3 numbers saw the Roseanne premiere add 2.1 rating points to bring it to a 7.3 rating. That lift is the third biggest in the adults 18-49 demo, following two episodes of The Big Bang Theory from years ago.
Roseanne’s big success has already led to ABC ordering another season and a congratulatory call from the president. The big question now is, are those massive ratings sustainable? Previous revivals The X-Files and Will & Grace saw notable declines for their second week back, but neither of those shows debuted to these kinds of numbers.
New episodes of Roseanne air Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
(via Deadline)
