2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee Programming Seen By 7.5M

The 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee finals drew its largest television audience since 2015.

Viewership of the finals live on June 2 was 147% higher than in 2021. Harini Logan, 14, from San Antonio, Texas, won this year’s Bee in the event’s first-ever spell-off.

Overall, Spelling Bee programming across the Scripps networks was seen by 7.5 million viewers. That includes the finals, semifinals and the Road to the Bee one-hour original special.

The E.W. Scripps Co. decided last fall to move the Bee to its own networks in an effort to make the competition more accessible than in recent years, with the semifinals and finals airing for the first time on Scripps national television networks Ion, Bounce, Laff and TrueReal. Those networks can be found free and over-the-air as well as on cable and streaming platforms.

Other highlights:

• The live finals broadcast on Ion, Bounce, Laff and TrueReal combined to reach 3.7 million viewers, while the semifinals on June 1 reached 3.1 million viewers — the highest audience ever for the semis.
• Streaming added significantly to the overall audience. Altogether, Bee programming was watched for nearly 5 million hours (4.5 million on linear TV and 320,0000 via streaming).

“We are gratified to see the sizable increase in viewership we expected by bringing the Bee to free TV — the media platform accessible to nearly every American across the country,” Scripps President-CEO Adam Symson said. “The Bee is now even better positioned to connect with the next generation of spellers.”

The Bee was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was held in a mostly virtual format in 2021. This year’s competition returned to the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center just outside of Washington, D.C.

Scripps says the Bee “is the nation’s longest-running educational program, having launched in 1925.”