The Most Iconic Halloween TV Show Episodes
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From Criminal Minds to Friends, Americans love tuning into their favorite show’s Halloween episodes to get in the spirit (and find some costume inspiration, too).
In honor of this lighthearted Halloween content, the TV lovers at USDISH set out to find which shows Americans sink their teeth into based on search volume, viewership, and ratings. Move over Jason and Freddy, there are new Halloween icons in town from these episodes!
Here are some spooktacular findings from our report:
- Although The Simpsons had 10 out of the 15 Halloween episodes on our list, Friends was still the most popular show in most states during October.
- The 1990 premiere of the “Treehouse of Horror” episode of The Simpsons had the most views at 27.4 million. Friends’ “The One with the Halloween Party” was the runner-up with just under 27 million views.
- Stranger Things, which premiered in 2017, is the newest show on our list and ranked as #12 with the most views.
Watch the trailer to Stranger Things Season 4 below.
Methodology
The team at USDISH looked at the top 15 episodes on IMDb that were tagged “Halloween,” produced between 1990 and 2020, had over 1,500 votes, and had a rating of 7.5 or higher. From there, we found the episode premiere’s viewership in the TV by the Numbers archive and ranked the shows from most to least popular based on viewership.
To find out each state’s most popular TV show during Halloween, we looked at Google Trends data from October 1–October 30, 2020 to find which show had the greatest search volume in each state.
