Super togetherness

I don't really care about the Super Bowl game scheduled to take place this coming Sunday. Football doesn't hold much appeal. It's not you, pigskin, it's me.

That said, I'll still tune in to watch the Seattle Seahawks take on the New England Patriots—if only to feel as though I'm a part of something. Touchdowns and fumbles. Deflategate fallout. Katy Perry. All those million-dollar ads.

After all, the game will likely be the biggest televised event of the year. It usually is. Last year's Super Bowl, the 43-8 beat down that the Seahawks levied against the Denver Broncos, averaged 111.5 million U.S. viewers. (Globally, the broadcast earned 167 million viewers.) According to Nielsen Media Research, that made it the most-watched event in U.S. televised history. As in, of all time.

In today's ever-fractured media landscape, that's pretty extraordinary. Compare the figures, for example, to the 2013-14 season's most-watched series, CBS's The Big Bang Theory, which averaged 23.1 million viewers.

I grew up in a pre-DVR era when people all tuned in at an appointed time to watch a TV show together. Archaic, I know.

On average, according to Nielsen ratings, nearly 35 million people turned on their sets to watch The Cosby Show during its peak. It was a simpler time (and a more innocent one, obviously)—one without the distractions of countless Tumblrs, a million YouTube channels, live-Tweeting or status updates.

Some day we'll tell our kids about a time when people shared cultural experiences when they happened, not when they got around to it.

Call it nostalgia, but I look forward to sharing such collective cultural moments, if only once a year. Because, let's face it, time-shifting the great Janet Jackson Nip Slip of 2004 just wouldn't have been the same.