Big news for NBC today: The ratings for their live telecast of The Sound of Music Live!—in other words, the thing everyone on Twitter hated last night—are in, and according to EW, they're huge. Apparently, the telecast pulled in NBC's highest Thursday ratings for an adult demographic in four years, since the finale of ER aired back in 2009. So how many is a lot? Reportedly, 18.5 million people tuned in for the three hour production, which starred Carrie Underwood as Maria, and True Blood's Stephen Moyer as Captain von Trapp.
In addition to pulling in the highest Thursday ratings for an adult demo in four years, the telecast also managed to break the record for the most-watched Thursday night ever on the network, since the finale of Frasier back in 2004. It even managed to beat CBS's new episode of The Big Bang Theory last night, which is amazing considering we all know that show cannot be stopped.
Interestingly, Uproxx is predicting that The Sound of Music Live!'s Thursday night success might spell the demise of NBC's comedy block, particularly Parks and Recreation and Community, in favor of airing more specials that could pull in the same monster ratings that this telecast did. While that would be terrible (AND WE WOULD ALL RIOT), it seems pretty unlikely—a telecast like this one gets such high ratings because it's not done frequently, so if the network were to up the frequency, people would get bored. There wouldn't be any novelty in it, anymore.
You can check out the full ratings list for last night over at EW.
[via EW]
