8 Insane Urban Legends About Famous TV Shows
4. The Ed Sullivan Show Briefly Managed To Halt Crime In America
Everybody loves The Beatles. Who doesn't love The Beatles? For most of us who weren't alive during the band's heyday, we can only imagine the true power of Beatlemania. With that said, the group's insane record sales speak for themselves, and their pervasive legacy remains just as powerful as it was several decades ago.
Which makes this particular legend very interesting. It states that during the band's first interview on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 in essence their first big television appearance in America that crime rates across the U.S. uniformly plummeted. The Chicago Sun-Times, for example, wrote that no major crime was reported in New York City between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.
According to viewing figures, the show was watched by around seventy-three million people, and it's credited with the significant (yet brief) drop in American juvenile crime. Whether or not this is true is one of those things that's now difficult to measure, but given the fact that it was written about in newspapers and features in various Beatles biographies suggests there might be at least some validity to the claim.