List of most watched television episodes

The following content contains the tentative list of the most watched television broadcasts around the world in selected countries, with the corresponding peak viewership (or ratings share) records, the corresponding year of such broadcast, and the mentioned media research organizations tallying nationwide viewership records. Take note, however, that the most watched television broadcast in any of the following nations can also be broadcast simultaneously in other countries and rank among their most watched television broadcasts as well.

On 20 July 1969, an estimated 530 million people watched the live global broadcast of the first ever humans walk on the surface of the moon (this constituted around 14% of total population of the world at the time), despite the fact that the first moonwalk took place in the middle of the night in Europe (at 02:56 in Ireland, Portugal and the United Kingdom and 03:56 in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain) and it was not broadcast in the Eastern Bloc except Romania and Poland.

IPG independent media agency Initiative Worldwide estimated that 260 million people worldwide watched the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final (the average audience for the broadcast of the game). Six hundred million watched some part of the game (the "reach"). In 2010 another independent firm estimated that 322 million viewers watched the 2006 final on average, with a reach of 638 million. None of these figures match the estimate by event organizers FIFA, a "global cumulative audience" of 715.1 million people.

U.S. television programming remains one of the most popular forms of entertainment worldwide. This trend was initiated by U.S.-made soap operas and sitcoms such as Dallas, M*A*S*H, The Cosby Show, Seinfeld and Friends, which aired from the early 1980s until the mid-2000s, and then in the late 2000s and 2010s by U.S. medical dramas and police procedurals such as House, CSI and NCIS franchises. All of these are currently syndicated in more than 100 countries, reaching almost 1 billion viewers around the world, and rank among the most watched television series in the world, extending their dominance to a 3-decade span.

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