10 Best Post-Super Bowl TV Episodes, From ‘Friends’ to ‘New Girl’

While networks occasionally followed the game with either a new series or a notable episode of an established one, the value of the time slot was so overlooked that, in 1981, NBC wasted it on a rerun of the motorcycle cop drama CHiPs. Two years later, the same network tried something different, airing the second episode of The A-Team, a lighthearted action drama about a quartet of fugitive mercenaries with a gift for improvising weaponry out of trash. (And for firing hundreds of bullets per week without ever once killing, or even wounding, anyone.) The series instantly shot into the Nielsen top 10, made a superstar of the imposing Mr. T, and convinced the TV business that the Super Bowl was a guaranteed hitmaker. This would prove easier than it sounded.

When ABC finally got a chance to air the Super Bowl in 1985, it squandered the post-game time slot on MacGruder and Loud, a forgettable cop show whose gimmick was that its title characters were secretly married, with a hidden passageway between their adjacent apartments. The next time it had a turn in the rotation, ABC did much better with The Wonder Years, a nostalgic coming-of-age comedy set in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The first episode — which concluded with middle schoolers Kevin (Fred Savage) and Winnie (Danica McKellar) kissing to Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” — struck such a chord with audiences that ABC was able to get away with waiting nearly two months to air the second episode, which was even higher-rated.

Either the longest-running, or second-longest, depending on your point of view, of any scripted show to premiere after the game, Homicide was also among the oddest choices ever. The cop drama, based on a non-fiction book by future The Wire co-creator David Simon, was almost defiantly anti-commercial — talky and abstract, with a cast full of unglamorous character actors (including future TV legend Andre Braugher) — and in no way felt like the kind of thing designed for a mass audience that had just watched the Cowboys pummel the Bills. But NBC executives liked Homicide — as they should, as it’s one of the greatest network dramas ever, and easily the best show not currently available to stream. And that network in the Nineties was so successful that it could afford to carry seven seasons of a show whose ratings never again remotely approached its pilot audience.

With A-Team and Wonder Years as the only real hits to premiere after the game to that point, NBC decided to try something different in ’96, using the Super Bowl to pump the ratings of a show that was already a phenomenon. The super-sized episode — literally called, typo and all, “The One After the Superbowl” — featured a bevy of guest stars, including Julia Roberts, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Brooke Shields (whose performance was so well-received, it landed her her own, albeit terrible, NBC Thursday night sitcom, Suddenly Susan), plus a reunion between Ross and his beloved monkey Marcel. It was the most-watched Friends episode ever, with nearly 53 million people tuning in. Seen by almost half of all people watching TV that night, it was so successful that it reoriented the business into using the time slot as a showcase for preexisting successes. (The next year, for instance, Fox aired one of the best X-Files episodes ever, “Leonard Betts,” about a mutant man who literally ate cancer.) 

The only reason Family Guy doesn’t clearly hold the title over Homicide is because Fox canceled Seth MacFarlane’s animated comedy — canceled it twice, in fact — before resurrecting it into the decades-spanning juggernaut it is today. In fact, there was a 13-year stretch where the only new shows to premiere after the game were MacFarlane productions, with American Dad in 2005. (And even that one aired after a new Simpsons episode, where the order was reversed for Family Guy.)

The first season of Survivor took television by storm in the summer of 2000. For the second, CBS had the bold idea to take on NBC’s seemingly unbeatable Thursday night lineup, by scheduling the granddaddy of reality TV competition series opposite Friends. It was a wild idea, but one with great timing, because CBS had the Super Bowl that year and could premiere The Australian Outback after the game, greasing the skids for the second episode to perform well in its new home four nights later. The whopping 46th installment of Survivor will launch later this month, so that worked out pretty well.

Rather than either try to launch a new show, or make a fortune in ad money with a special episode of an ongoing hit, ABC in 2001 tried to use the time slot to turn a modest success into a big one. J.J. Abrams’ espionage-thriller Alias had lots of buzz, but middling ratings, in part because its serialized plot — where Jennifer Garner’s Sydney Bristow discovered that she was working for an evil spy organization called SD-6, and not the CIA — made it hard for additional viewers to join in, back in the pre-streaming days. So Abrams wrote an episode, “Phase One,” that would seemingly end the SD-6 arc and create an easy starting point for newcomers, and even gilded the lily by opening the episode with Sydney strutting around in both black and red lingerie sets. The problem was, the Buccaneers-Raiders game ended so late, and then ABC Sports’ post-game coverage — including the seemingly endless payoff to a gag about magicians Penn & Teller predicting the final score — ran so long, that “Phase One” didn’t start airing until after 11 p.m., at a point when the majority of viewers had turned off their TVs and gone to bed. It was the least-watched Super Bowl night episode since the mid-Eighties, and while Alias lasted several more seasons, it never became the smash that it seemed on the verge of becoming when it got this high-profile assignment.

With the Alias gambit a failure, the networks went back to sure things after the game: big episodes of already-big hits. One of the best of these was the first half of a Grey’s Anatomy Season Two two-parter, where the surgeons have to treat a man with a piece of unexploded ordnance stuck inside his body — and the hands of terrified paramedic Christina Ricci the only thing keeping it from blowing up and killing everyone in the operating room. “It’s the End of the World” is incredibly tense, features great guest work from Ricci and (as a superhumanly calm bomb disposal expert) Kyle Chandler, and ended on a fantastic cliffhanger where Meredith somehow ended up as the one with her hands on the device. A show at the peak of its powers, deservedly given the brightest spotlight available. 

If the opening of “Stress Relief” — where Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch devolves into chaos when Dwight stages a wildly over-the-top fire drill — isn’t the single funniest scene in TV history, it’s in the conversation. (At minimum, you can expect to see Angela hurling her cat Bandit into the office ceiling for as long as there are montages of classic sitcom moments.) The rest of the episode that follows isn’t too shabby, between Dwight and Michael ruining a CPR course (and a CPR dummy), Michael being humiliated by a mild roast from his coworkers, and then Michael somehow endearing himself to the group with his own lame insults. (“Stanley, you crush your wife during sеx and your heart sucks. Boom. Roasted.”)

Outside of his own movies and music videos, Prince almost never acted onscreen. But 17 years after he hosted an episode of Muppets Tonight (back when he was going by The Artist Formerly Known as Prince), the music legend delightfully played himself on New Girl. The episode, simply called “Prince,” presents its title character as a mythic figure, capable of appearing inside a locked room without warning, ordering butterflies to land on his shoulder, or — in a development befitting a post-Super Bowl showcase — help convince Jess (Zooey Deschanel) that she should tell Nick (Jake Johnson) that she loves him, after Jess panics when Nick says it to her. At one point, Prince invites Jess to duet with him on his new single, “Fallinlove2nite,” and when her friends wonder how Jess knew the words, her answer says it all: “I think Prince is magic.”