This Is Us finale shatters its own ratings records

We all knew that the This Is Us finale was going to generate some huge ratings. The big question was, for the most part, precisely how huge they were going to be. Let’s just say that we’re now glad to have some answers following a temporary outage over at Nielsen.

Now, here’s what we can tell you about the big episode entitled “Moonshadow” — it generated a 3.4 rating in the 18-49 demographic alongside 12.8 million viewers, and was the #1 show of the night by a fairly wide margin. These are the show’s best ratings, and more than that, they are the best ratings for NBC overall in the time period since an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent that was on the air a good ten years ago. This is a show that NBC clearly loves, and one that will not be going anywhere in the near future.

What’s especially fun about the success of the show is that when you look at it on paper, there is very little reason why it should be this big of a hit. It’s a family drama whose biggest star is probably Mandy Moore, and even with her this is the first time in a while where she’d been in the spotlight. It managed to win people over on the strength of a wonderful marketing campaign, a premise that was all about key moments in your life, and also providing real, genuine moments with its viewers. This is a trend that we imagine many networks trying to emulate moving into the new season, largely because this is the sort of thing that often tends to happen. You find something that works, and then other people do their best to copy it.

Here’s the bad news

Very few people stuck around after This Is Us to watch the premiere of Trial & Error starring John Lithgow. The comedy generated a 1.4 and a 1.0 in the demo across its two episodes. Were these ratings from a Thursday broadcast, that’d be great. However, they lost well more than half of their lead-in, and this does not give us a whole lot of hope in terms of it succeeding down the line this season.

You can view more of our coverage of the This Is Us finale, including taking a further look ahead to the second season, by heading over to the link here right now.

Did you watch the This Is Us finale live? Are you surprised at all by the magnitude of its ratings? Be sure to share in the comments. (Photo: NBC.)