| How I Met Your Mother This Season | Notable Penultimate -> Series Finales |
| 3.7 (premiere, 9/23/13) 3.20 (average) 2.7 -> 2.9 -> 3.5 (last three weeks) | 3.5 -> 6.0 (ER, 4/2/09) (+71%) 4.3 -> 5.8 (Lost, 5/23/10) (+35%) 2.7 -> 3.2 (Desperate Housewives, 5/13/12) (+19%) 2.2 -> 2.9 (House, 5/21/12) (+32%) 2.3 -> 3.0 (The Office, 5/16/13) (+30%) 3.4 -> 5.3 (Breaking Bad, 9/29/13) (+56%) |
For comparison's sake, I throw out ER, which was drawing on a past audience that made the show top-5 for its first eight seasons, and Breaking Bad, which had the full promotional resources of an entire channel for the whole week leading into the finale. (HIMYM, on the other hand, doesn't even have the lead-in retrospective special that most of these shows did.) With those gone, the typical week-to-week growth for these finales is somewhere in the 30's percent. HIMYM is a stronger/hotter show than many of these were by the end, but it also doesn't have a huge former audience to bring back. A 30% week-to-week increase would be a 4.55, and a 40% week-to-week increase would be a 4.9. I don't have a compelling reason to go way outside of this range, but the titular event could drag it toward the upper end.
Over/Under: 4.85.
Just in case the finals are separated into 8:00 and 8:30 episodes, please note that we'll take the average of the two episodes' unrounded ratings.
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