TV Madness: ‘Outlander’ rolls on to become 2016 champion

Over the past three weeks, tens of thousands of votes have been cast in our TV Madness show tournament, and we’re very pleased now to confirm the results that many poll-trackers may have already been aware of: “Outlander” is the 2016 champion!

We’re not going to pretend as though we’re surprised that the Starz drama ended up winning the tournament. It has an enormous following, and we knew that going in. It’s only real challenge came ironically in the very first week, when fans of “Longmire” on Netflix really pushed hard and at one point had a short lead. If these two shows remain in the tournament next year, “Longmire” probably showed that it was worthy of a higher seed than #7 to start off with.

The biggest surprise of us in the final showdown was the complete decimation of fellow finalist “Once Upon a Time” in the final round. The fairy-tale drama only got a minuscule 2% of the vote, and it came after it had some huge come-from-behind victories including against “Poldark” and “Halt and Catch Fire,” two shows with large social followings. Based on the past data we assumed that “Outlander” probably would win with around 60-70% of the vote, mostly because we thought “Once Upon a Time” fans would push harder. In the end, we attribute this blowout to both “Outlander” fans being extremely passionate (perhaps even more so than previously in this poll series), and “Once Upon a Time” fans being a little slow on the uptake. This was the shortest voting window to date, and in the past their fans have had a little more time to pick up steam.

Anyway, this was a lot of fun, and we hope everyone enjoyed taking part in it this year! We look forward to doing more in the future. For now, remember that our reigning champ “Outlander” premieres on Starz on Saturday, April 9.