As we noted—in the immediate aftermath of the televised event—it wasn’t entirely clear who ABC News’ big primetime special last night, showcasing a 20-minute interview between George Stephanopoulos and President Joe Biden, was actually for. People worried about Biden’s performance after the previous week’s presidential debate got to see that, sure, he can mostly hold a conversation for less than half an hour in a tightly controlled environment without doing or saying anything obviously distressing; folks hoping to hear the man sincerely address concerns about his health and ongoing fitness for duty as he gears up for a hypothetical four more years in office got a bucket of platitudes, and not much more. Now, though, we have a clearer picture of the main winner of the event: ABC News itself, which picked up the kind of hefty bump in its numbers that the Biden camp would probably kill for at this point.
This is per Deadline, which reports that the Biden interview absolutely crushed the network’s rivals in Friday night viewing, reportedly drawing more eyes than NBC, CBS, and Fox’s offerings combined. (Admittedly, said offerings were Lingo, WWE Friday Night Smackdown, and a rerun of the Night Court revival, but still: Good numbers for a conversation with an octogenarian.) Nielsen says about 8.1 million people watched the interview live, making it ABC News’ most-watched broadcast (barring election night coverage and the debates themselves, the most recent of which drew 51 million eyes) since Stephanopoulos interviewed James Comey back in 2018. (The interview’s YouTube upload by ABC News has also been viewed roughly half a million times.)
The upshot of which, we guess, is that if the interview existed primarily to prove to a certain fraction of voters that Biden is still basically functional, it presented said evidence to a respectable number of people. (See also the many other live-ish interviews POTUS has been rolling out since the debate in an effort to seem less, uh, scarecrow-like.) Nice to see somebody getting a big numbers boost out of the effort, at least.