The fear of missing out was in full swing on Sunday, as it seemed everyone and their mother was glued to the television for the series finale of “Breaking Bad.” Despite the fact that I’ve never watched an episode of the AMC show about high school chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin, Walter White, I feel like I already know everything that happens based on the endless tweets and Facebook posts bemoaning the end of the show.

And they really were endless.  According to Social Guide, a social measurement website, there were 1.24 million tweets about “Breaking Bad” between the airings of the East Coast and West Coast shows, making it the most tweeted-about topic on Sunday.

Over a million tweets…about a show that isn’t even on a network channel and has been in danger of being canceled for over half of its run due to low ratings.  Sure, “Breaking Bad” just won an Emmy for Best Primetime Drama, but it’s unlikely that that alone is the reason why people are jumping on the Breaking Bad bandwagon at an unusually high rate.

If you look at the numbers, it’s pretty crazy how quickly Heisenberg and Company have risen.  During the first four seasons of “Breaking Bad,” only the season four premiere reached above two million viewers.  The fifth and final season, which was split into two parts, received a more noticeable amount of viewers during the first half with an average of 2.6 million viewers.

But the second half of the fifth season is where viewership took off at an unbelievable rate. The first episode received 5.92 million viewers, almost double the amount of viewers received by any other episode of “Breaking Bad.”  The ratings only went up, culminating in a record-breaking 10.3 million viewers tuning in for the finale.

Not only did “Breaking Bad” increase its audience by an insane amount, it beat almost every single network program.  So how did a critically acclaimed but low-rated show become a full-blown pop culture phenomenon in such a short amount of time?

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when and why specifically “Breaking Bad” became the talked-about pop culture phenomenon.  Take the HBO show “Enlightened” for example. The show premiered three years after “Breaking Bad,” and received just about the same average rating from critics—a 75/100 rating on the website Metacritic compared to the 74/100 received by  the first season of “Breaking Bad”.  Yet “Enlightened” was canceled after two seasons, after HBO executives grew tired of waiting for audiences to pick up on this critically-acclaimed show.

Streaming old episodes on Netflix has definitely helped “Breaking Bad.”  Viewers are able to instantly watch the show that all of their friends have been talking about, rather than having to wait three months until the new season premieres, when they will most likely have forgotten about it.

Of course, social media was another platform that refused to allow its users to forget about “Breaking Bad.”  On the day of the series finale, Buzzfeed posted eleven articles about the event, and among the 1.24 million tweets even Warren Buffet had something to say about the finale.

The reality is, it is platforms like Twitter and Netflix and Buzzfeed, which provide non-stop information to users, that are what help bring underrated topics into the public forum.  Without the endless posts I saw about them on social media sites, I would have never known what “Breaking Bad” is, what a cult following Pumpkin Spice Lattes have, or even how serious the current crisis in Syria was.

“Breaking Bad” has pretty much always been a show that critics have been encouraging more viewers to watch, and the Syrian Civil War has been an ongoing, brutal affair for two years that probably should have been quashed sooner. But both this show and this crisis had to receive consistent recognition from a group of people that continued to grow, until they both became regular household topics of conversation.

This makes sense.  Most people—myself included—aren’t going to want to take time to do their own research on what television shows to watch or what foreign affairs they should be following. They are going to wait until they hear from a few people that “this show is so good” or “this conflict is so important” before they know they should probably check it out.

But the “Breaking Bad” phenomenon provides us with an important, consistent, and yet oftentimes unacknowledged problem.  The topics that are acknowledged are the ones that have the most people talking about them, even though there are equally as important ones out there.   For whatever reason, these issues or shows just take off suddenly and go from having almost no one talking about them to having everyone talk about them.

So next time, when you’re trying to choose a new show to watch, consider the ones that have been around for a while, have had positive things said about them, but aren’t the most popular—you might surprise a few people by being ahead of the curve.