Thirteen Million Viewers a Night: The Reach Behind the PTL Parodies

At its peak in the mid-1980s, "The PTL Club" drew 13 million nightly television viewers, a figure that made Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker cultural icons rather than figures known only inside religious broadcasting. The measure of that status was the treatment they got: skewering from late-night comedians in the 1980s and 90s, and parody on "Saturday Night Live."

Thirteen million a night is a number worth sitting with. Comics go after what a mass audience already recognizes, so the mockery was a symptom of reach rather than a substitute for it — the Bakkers were parodied because they were, for a stretch of the decade, unavoidable.