Few TV shows have a more dramatic disconnect between industry and viewer response than the ManningCast. The Peyton and Eli Show, an alternate Monday Night Football broadcast that will be televised 11 times during the regular season and the Super Bowl, continues to draw rave reviews from the critics — while not moving the needle that truly matters.
On Monday night, for example, only 705,000 of the 23.2 million viewers who watched the Broncos-Chiefs game were tuned in to ESPN2 for the combination football broadcast/talk show, via Andrew Marchand of The Athletic.
That’s only three pecent of the total audience.
This year, the stakes become even higher, given that ESPN reportedly plans to have a Pat McAfee alternate broadcast on ESPN2 during the weeks that the Mannings don’t do their show. What if the McAfee show outperforms the ManningCast?
The ultimate apples-to-apple comparison will happen during the Super Bowl, if the primary broadcast is accompanied by both a ManningCast and a McAfeeFest.
Everyone involved will say all the right things. They’re teammates. The numbers don’t matter. Yada. Yada. Yada. And they’ll all obsess over the numbers, with whoever draws the smaller crowd becoming tormented by the final verdict, as issued by those who control the remote. Control.
