Lady Gaga Muppets special flops in ratings on Thanksgiving night

Lady Gaga may live for the applause-plause, but she did not get much of it on Thanksgiving night as her Lady Gaga & The Muppets Holiday Spectacular was a spectacular disappointment in the ratings.

The ARTPOP singer starred in a 90-minute special on ABC at 9:30 p.m., but the special drew just 3.6 million viewers and 0.9 rating among the adults 18-49 demographic. Those numbers are far less than ABC's annual repeat of the 1973 special A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, which drew 5.3 million viewers and a 1.6 demo rating in the 8 p.m. time slot this year.

Lady Gaga also aired a holiday special entitled A Very Gaga Thanksgiving in 2011 in the same time slot on ABC. That special fared much better with 5.5 million viewers and a 1.6 rating in the demo. This year's Muppets special featured appearances by Kermit the Frog and other Muppets along with Elton John, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, RuPaul and more.

As for the other programs of the night, football dominated the ratings. NBC's 8:30 p.m. game, which featured bitter rival Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens, amassed 18.6 million viewers. The game featured a down-to-the-wire finish (Baltimore won 22-20) and a frightening helmet-to-helmet hit on Pittsburgh's Le'Veon Bell, who lost his helmet as he almost reached the goal line and was knocked unconscious.

Fox was the only network to maintain its usual schedule of original programming on Thanksgiving night. The X Factor had 3.8 million viewers and a 1.0 demo rating, while Glee had 2.8 million viewers and 0.9 rating.