With sports suspended, ESPN has cobbled together a schedule that includes classic games, studio shows and films — the most popular of which was “The Last Dance.”
New York (CNN Business)With sports suspended, ESPN has cobbled together a schedule that includes classic games, studio shows and films — the most popular of which was “The Last Dance.”
The network’s docuseries about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls isn’t a sporting event, but it nabbed event-sized ratings for ESPN, averaging 5.6millionviewers over its 10-episode run, which made it the most watched documentary ever for ESPN. To give that number some context, a Sunday Night Baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees last year brought in roughly 2 million viewers.
Now, it’s not very hard to get viewers to watch a documentary about the most popular athlete in history amid a pandemic that’s forcing everyone to stay home, but “The Last Dance” has been an unexpected savior for ESPN by acting as a programming tourniquet. It helped ESPN bring in sports-like ratings during a time when sports are on hold.
“We knew it would be a big deal, even if it had gone as we had planned. But obviously as the events of the last few months have unfolded and live sports largely disappeared, it’s taken on a whole new importance to us,” Connor Schell, ESPN’s executive vice president of content, told CNN Business.
Schell added that at a time when people are starving for sports, “The Last Dance” was able to give fans “a reason to come together on Sunday nights.”
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“I’ve felt really good about ESPN’s programming overall during this crisis,” he said. “But we’re not naive enough to say that ‘The Last Dance’ sitting in the middle of this hasn’t been really important to our connection to our audience and the way people have engaged with our brand.
