The weepy wrap-up of an extended storyline on This Is Us — coupled with a huge lead-in from Super Bowl LII — boosted the NBC drama to a record audience of 27 million viewers Sunday, though the crowd for the game itself was far from a record.
Us more than doubled its previous same-day audience (12.9 million for September’s second-season opener), and is likely to grow substantially when delayed viewing is counted, since the episode began at the late hour of 10:45 p.m. ET.
It marked the biggest post-Bowl program since 2012, when the second-season opener of NBC’s The Voice averaged 37.6 million viewers. And it was the most-watched TV drama episode since 2008, when Fox’s red-hot medical drama House notched 29 million, also after that year’s Super Bowl.
