Television
The film has been broadcast annually on the ABC network since 1973, traditionally during the Easter holiday, as well as Passover. Like the commercial network telecasts of Ben-Hur, the lengthy film is always shown in one evening instead of being split up into two, making it necessary for ABC to pre-empt its entire network schedule between 7:00 pm and midnight/ET-PT on the nights that it is shown, although local affiliates have the right to tape delay the showing an hour ahead to 8 pm ET/PT to keep their schedules in line for early evening. Currently, the movie is shown the Saturday before Easter as part of the ABC Saturday Night Movie lineup. In 2010, the movie was broadcast in HDTV for the first time, which allowed the television audience to see it in its original VistaVision aspect ratio.
- Ratings by year (between 2007 and 2011)
| Number |
Year |
Episode |
Rating |
Share |
Rating/Share (18–49) |
Viewers (millions) |
Rank (timeslot) |
Rank (night) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "2007" | April 7, 2007 | TBA | TBA | TBA | 7.87 | TBA | TBA |
| 2 | "2008" | March 22, 2008 | 4.7 | 9 | 2.3/7 | 7.91 | 1 | 1 |
| 3 | "2009" | April 11, 2009 | 4.2 | 8 | 1.7/6 | 6.81 | 1 | 1 |
| 4 | "2010" | April 3, 2010 | TBA | TBA | 1.4/5 | 5.88 | 2 | 3 |
| 5 | "2011" | April 23, 2011 | TBA | TBA | 1.6/5 | 7.05 | 1 | 1 |
Read more about this topic: The Ten Commandments (1956 film)
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)
“We cannot spare our children the influence of harmful values by turning off the television any more than we can keep them home forever or revamp the world before they get there. Merely keeping them in the dark is no protection and, in fact, can make them vulnerable and immature.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“Photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)