There used to be some intellectual cachet in sniffing that you didn't watch television, but that time is past.
The share figure indicates that 27percentt of all Americans watching television at that time were watching "Millionaire".
Television, at that time still partially free of state interference, lashed out at the Kremlin's cover-ups and Mr Putin's callousness.
Rival reality show Strictly Come Dancing stormed ahead in the ratings, attracting a peak audience of 9.9 million viewers - 43 per cent of those watching television at that time.
Now we tend to sneer at television from that time - too many bad memories of Terry and June, Kojak and Mrs Slocombe.
"Working in UHF television at that time was like being in the French Foreign Legion," recalls Terry McGuirk, who was hired by Turner the summer after his junior year at Middlebury College, and who became Turner's protégé.
There was no mention of the margin of sampling error, a number representing how much the real audience could vary from the Nielsen survey result if there were an actual count of everyone watching television at that time.
"They all said he was one of the very few gay sort of characters that they saw on television at that time.
It received a Nielsen rating of 9.7, with a 14 share among viewers, meaning that 9.7 percent of all households in the United States, and 14 percent of people watching television at that time, tuned into the episode.
