The Thanksgiving holiday may not have been all that rosy for movie theaters, but at least TV scored a win from it—if you consider a whole bunch of people tuning in to watch a giant Luffy from One Piece getting his hat destroyed by cruel nature, and Al Roker interrupting a live TV broadcast to yell Good Burger
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This is per THR, which reports that Thursday’s broadcast of the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Parade was the most viewed version of the annual event ever, with 28.5 million people apparently tuning in to view NBC’s broadcast of the event. Among other things, that makes the parade broadcast the single most-watched entertainment program of the year on linear TV. Not bad for the 97th iteration of this particular parade—especially since a decent chunk of the viewership was in the 18-49 demographic, who we do not typically think of as prime “looking at balloon types.”
Really, though, this year’s parade had everything: Political turmoil (as protestors of Israel’s treatment of Palestine managed to shut down the event for half an hour), plus a genuine balloon disaster, as a One Piece balloon got punctured by a tree branch, causing Monkey D. Luffy’s famed straw hat to get pretty Monkey D.-flated as it made its way along the route. And, most importantly, the bit where Al Roker—who was absent from last year’s parade due to health reasons—interrupted the conversation when Thompson and Mitchell drove by in their Good Burger-mobile to serenade them with songs and lines from their own work. (Roker is actually apparently in Good Burger 2, so this might be a bit of savvy cross-promotion…or an expression of Roker’s deep and genuine love of Good Burger as an enduring work of American art.)