Missing Game of Thrones?

Ten days after the Game of Thrones Finale, Kelly Kirkham questions if all the hype was worth it.

*This article DOES NOT contain any spoilers, and the plot will be protected from those who have not yet seen the finale.

VPS customers are big Game of Thrones fans. Tweets and status updates about the show on our social media channels have always received high amounts of retweets and likes. And rightly so. Since the final aired, it’s been hailed as the strongest finale in the history of the show and it’s even been rumoured to be in the running for an Oscar.

Hashtags such as #TheChildren and #GOTSeason4, meanwhile, have been trending like crazy on twitter, and Google Trends recently reported that the show got twice as many searches on Google than the World Cup, during the tournament’s opening week.

But is the hype really worth it? In the grand scheme of things, how does Game of Thrones The Children, with its 9.5 million viewers, measure up to the great finals of the past? One final it can’t compete with is the Super Bowl, which attracted 111 million viewers.

In the world of television series’, though, there is one event that most people over the age of 35 remember vividly. This is the M*A*S*H* finale titled ‘Goodbye, Farewell and Amen’. The airing of this episode in 1983 was a milestone in many households and attracted a whopping 105.9 million viewers – that accounted for 60.3 percent of all US households at the time. Now imagine that, in 1983, a lot less people actually had television sets, not to mention that there were two and a half billion less people in the world. So, GOT didn’t beat M*A*S*H*, but that’s not too surprising. We will keep looking.

Another historical television moment is the last episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. This monumental event marked the end of an era and many people still claim that television wasn’t the same after Johnny Carson was replaced by Jay Leno. Fifty million viewers tuned in for the tear-jerking moment when Bette Midler serenaded Johnny with “One More for the Road” before he said goodbye.

When looking at these huge viewing numbers, suddenly Game of Thrones: The Children doesn’t look so special, but there is one big difference in these programs. Game of Thrones is a HBO series, whereas M*A*S*H* and The Tonight Show were all publicly syndicated. It is hard to compare a cable series to shows that are available to everyone. So let’s take a look at statistics specifically targeted at cable television.

The really big cable shows last year were The Walking Dead (AMC) with 16.2 million viewers, Duck Dynasty (A&E) with 13.4 million viewers, Breaking Bad (AMC) with 8.5 million viewers, and Sons of Anarchy (FX) with 7.1 million viewers. So, in the world of cable television, Game of Throne’s really didn’t do so badly. In fact, The Children rates somewhere in between Breaking Bad and Duck Dynasty. All things considered, that really is kind of a big deal.

In conclusion, within the world of television we can’t all be the Super Bowl. Nevertheless, as long as the Starks and the Lannisters continue their blood feud with all the extras thrown in for fluff, I think Game of Thrones will keep going into the fifth season, the sixth and possibly beyond.

Above image by Sandstein