Breaking Bad Finale Breaks Ratings Records

Most TV shows tend to lose viewers as they wind down into their final seasons, but Breaking Bad was never most TV shows. It just kept getting more popular. Last night's acclaimed series finale pulled in a massive 10.3 million viewers, smashing the show's own record of 6.6 million viewers for last's week's penultimate episode. Compare that with the show's season 4 finale, EW notes, which attracted 1.9 million viewers ... and was considered a success at the time. That's an increase of 442%.

But the finale didn't just break the show's own records: it was the most watched basic cable series finale ever, USA Today reports. The episode was torrented by more than 500,000 people in 12 hours, reports TorrentFreak, making it the most pirated episode of the series and a contender for the most pirated show of the year. The episode also generated 5.5 million "interactions" on Twitter, and 1.24 million tweets, USA Today reports. (More Breaking Bad stories.)