What is the most-watched movie ever broadcast on television?
“You haven’t seen a film unless you’ve seen it in the cinema,” is a phrase you might have heard if you’ve ever been trapped in a conversation with somebody desperate to share that they went to film school.
Admittedly, nothing quite compares to the experience of the cinema. Despite the lingering smell of stale popcorn, and the perpetually sticky floors, shutting yourself away from the world for an hour or two to immerse in an entirely different world has never really lost its appeal. Still, we are all living busy lives in the modern age, and cinema prices have long since been on the rise – particularly if you want to enjoy a completely unnecessary and massively cumbersome bucket of popcorn with your film.
So, for many people, the living room has become a cinema substitute. For decades, film showings have been a core staple of television schedules; from the Red Triangle films of 1980s Channel 4 to the endless onslaught of animated classics that seem to bookend the festive period every year. You don’t have to pay for a ticket, and you don’t have to deal with any annoying punters kicking the back of your seat for the duration of the film; it is easy to see why film on TV has been so popular over the years.
Speaking to just how many viewers television film showings can drag in, some of the most watched TV broadcasts of all time have been films. In the UK, for instance, the classic 1973 James Bond flick Live and Let Die amassed 23.5million viewers when broadcast on ITV back in 1980 – for reference, the 2012 Olympic closing ceremony had 23.2m viewers.
Despite those colossal numbers, Live and Let Die is not the only film to have commanded a colossal audience when broadcast on television. Over in the United States, where audience numbers admittedly trump that of the UK, the most-viewed television events are invariably made up of Superbowls. If you dig past the shoulder pads and concussions, though, the likes of M*A*S*H, soap opera Dallas, presidential debates, and coverage of the Gulf War also brought in huge viewing figures.
But another picture resides amogn that list, The Day After, which can take the acclaim of being the most-viewed film in the long-running history of television. Broadcast on ABC in 1983, the made-for-TV picture amassed an impressive audience of 77.4m people. To put that into context, it outstrips the massive watch-along of the Seinfeld finale.
Broadcast with the backdrop of the rapidly accelerating Cold War, the Nicholas Meyer-directed film presents a hypothetical nuclear conflict between NATO and the Soviet Union, focused on the rural surroundings of Kansas and Missouri, where many nuclear missile silos were kept during that time. As you might expect, the film leans more towards the nightmarish Cold War horror of films like Threads, rather than the satirical Cold War comedy of Dr. Strangelove.
The Day After was a pivotal picture in changing the perception of nuclear weaponry. Pushed by a monumental PR campaign which saw the movie broadcast by peace groups before an official broadcast, President Reagan said of the movie that it was “very effective and left me greatly depressed.”
In the wake of its release on ABC, the film was broadcast internationally on various networks, including the BBC. Most surprisingly, the film was aired within the Soviet Union, directly translated into Russian. So, not only was it the most-viewed TV film in US history, but it had a real, palpable impact on the global public and the entire course of the Cold War – it is no surprise that it brought in more viewers than the Seinfeld finale.
