What the Numbers Reveal About the ''

09.30.2013

The execs at AMC would probably say that all the critical praise being heaped on Sunday's "Breaking Bad" series finale is a satisfying enough capstone for the show's five-year run. But at of the day, the TV industry is ruled by metrics and data. And "Breaking Bad's" much-hyped series finale -- regardless of which yardstick you use -- performed very, very well.

Maybe you're old-fashioned and you want to crunch the Nielsen numbers? No problems there: Sunday's finale drew a series-high average audience of 10.3 million according to Nielsen-up 56 percent (3.7 million) from the previous week. The show pulled a 5.4 in primetime's key adult demographic of adults 18-49 (roughly 6.7 million viewers) and beat every broadcast premiere week show by that measure except CBS' "The Big Bang Theory."

To put the show in historical context, "Breaking Bad" is now the third most-watched cable finale of all time, behind HBO's 2007 "" ender with 11.9 million, and HBO's "Sex and the City," which drew 10.6 million in 2004.Â

But Nielsen only tells part of the story these days. You're nothing if you're not being talked about on Facebook. And there again, "Breaking Bad" ended on top.

According to Facebook, 3 million people generated more than 5.5 million interactions during Sunday night's finale. That's on top of the 23 million "Breaking Bad"-related interactions that the social media giant has tracked since the fifth season began.

The story was much the same over on Twitter, where the hashtags #BreakingBad and #GoodbyeBreakingBad, along with the names "Walter White" and "Vince Gilligan" were trending all night.Â

And in an age of cord cutters and torrent sites, this last figure might be the biggest mark of "Breaking Bad"'s successful final bow: more than half a million people had already illegally downloaded the series finale in the first 12 hours after it aired, according to TorrentFreak. It looks like "Breaking Bad" is on pace to possibly win the title of most pirated TV show of 2013.Â

Read more: Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, CBS News, USA Today.Â

Brief Take: Even critically acclaimed series have a hard time hitting the right now when they say goodbye (see: "The Sopranos," "," and more recently "Dexter."AMC and Vince Gilligan were under enormous pressure to deliver for viewers, and it looks like "Breaking Bad" may have managed to live up to the hype.Â