The internet lit up Tuesday afternoon as news broke that ABC had canceled the revived Roseanne following some extremely controversial comments that Roseanne Barr made on Twitter. As many applauded the move, we worked with three analytics companies with their eyes on the TV space to see exactly what ABC is giving up.
Data from emotion measurement company Canvs revealed that Roseanne was somewhat of an emotional lightning rod: an analysis of 95,000 emotional comments, about the show specifically since the reboot started airing on March 27, show that Roseanne had 19.9X higher level of dislike and 18.3X higher hate reactions than the average sitcom series.
Canvs also revealed that the show was the most emotionally reacted-to sitcom on TV. Over the course of the 2018 season, social conversations referencing Roseanne generated more than 4X as many emotional reactions than the next leading sitcom, Brooklyn Nine Nine.
According to iSpot.tv, which tracks performance for TV advertising in real-time, Roseanne generated 1.4 billion TV ad impressions from 204 primetime ad airings for its fresh episodes.
The revival of Roseanne didn’t just help ABC: reruns of the previous seasons running across TV Land, Paramount Network, CMT, Logo and Laff TV also got a boost. And while 46% of TV ad impressions come from 325 ad airings on ABC, nearly 30% of TV device impressions for ads are coming from TV Land, via more than 8,000 ad airings.
All told, the Roseanne TV show empire offered more than 500 brands the ability to advertise against the program and, all-in, the show generated 4.3 billion TV ad impressions on more than 30,000 ad airings.
Top advertisers for new episodes alone this year, by industry, included quick serve restaurants, soda, department stores, wireless and auto-makers.
According to Inscape.tv, which has glass-level TV device data from more than 8.5 million VIZIO TVs, at its peak more than 3% of all TV households tuned in to watch the reboot’s premiere on March 27.
Here’s a heatmap of viewership across the U.S. for the first two episodes (the darker the state, the more households were tuned in):
Inscape insights also reveal other shows watched by Roseanne viewers, namely 9-1-1, Blue Bloods, Chicago Fire, Chicago Med and Ellen’s Game of Games.
