While Fox may have secured the most-watched Super Bowl on record last weekend, its lead-out show achieved the opposite with a record low in viewership. Rob Lowe’s game show The Floor became the least-watched Super Bowl lead-out program since records began being tracked after Super Bowl VIII in 1974. According to data from Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch, The Floor averaged just 13.94 million viewers following the Philadelphia Eagles’ victory over the Kansas City Chiefs last Sunday, a significant drop from the 18.44 million viewers retained by CBS for last year’s episode of Tracker that aired after its Super Bowl broadcast.
Last November, Fox decided to place Lowe’s show in the post-Super Bowl slot instead of the originally planned scripted drama Rescue: Hi-Surf. This marks the third consecutive year Fox has chosen unscripted content for its Super Bowl lead-outs, following a new season of The Masked Singer after Super Bowl LIV in 2020 and a new season of Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef after Super Bowl LVII in 2023.
No doubt, The Floor suffered from the one-sided nature of Sunday’s game, as a closer match would likely have drawn a larger audience. It’s noteworthy that Fox managed to retain approximately 10% of the Super Bowl’s peak audience of 137.7 million viewers just hours later. Looking ahead to next year, NBC is expected to use its lead-out slot for the Winter Olympics, although there will be no live programming due to the time zone difference between the U.S. and Italy, unlike in 2022 when NBC aired live Winter Olympics programming from Beijing following Super Bowl LVI.
