Photo: Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for Hollywood Forei
With a few stars and even fewer nominated candidates, America more or less ignored Sunday night’s Golden Globes broadcast. Per Nielsen, a not-so-nice average audience of just 6.9 million, watched as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler presented the bicoastal performances on NBC, barely a third of the size of the 2020 viewer style (18, 3 million) and by far the least watched ceremony in modern Globes history. The demo ratings were even worse, with the three-hour Zoomathon achieving a 1.5-point mark with adults under 50, a decrease of 68 percent over a year ago (4.7). While the awards show was hit during COVID, no major event collapsed so quickly or on a scale similar to Sunday’s swan dive. And yes, CBS and ABC probably have good reason to be nervous about the prospects for the upcoming Grammy and Oscar broadcasts.
There is simply no sugar coverage on how horrible these numbers are. Although the Globes were able to escape the pandemic of the previous autumn, it was not much: TV’s best honor attracted only 6.1 million viewers on ABC in September last year, which was also a record low for the program. But the Emmys have dropped a very modest 11 percent of its pre-COVID audience, and in recent years the Globes have produced two to three times as many viewers as the Emmys. What’s more, while the Emmys alternate between the four major networks, NBC pays a huge premium for Globes exclusivity. In 2018, Variety reported that the Peacock agreed to pay $ 60 million a year for the Globes as part of a long-term licensing deal; by contrast, most reports have linked the amount that networks pay for the Emmys closer to $ 10 million a year.
To honor the Globes and NBC, the decline for last year’s Emmys was partly on the small side, as the show had much more consistent erosion among the public at the age of Netflix, and it did not have much more room to does not decrease. Performance-based music awards have achieved much greater hits over the past few months, and the public has shrunk from one-third to one-half compared to the past year. But the Globes crash was much more spectacular and painful, in part because NBC invested so much in promoting the show and because it signaled the return of Peacock vets Fey and Poehler as hosts. The network and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association have decided to invest the resources in the television broadcast, although all indications are that there is a likely Nielsen disaster: COVID means a whole slew of movie nominees that people have never heard of or who has never played in theaters, as well as the inability of stars to mingle and mingle in a ballroom. The week before the Globes ceremony was further dominated by the aftermath of a Los Angeles Times inquiry, which renewed questions about the legitimacy of the awards and revealed a lack of diversity among the show’s voting body.
In terms of Sunday’s ratings, the previous record low audience for a Globes broadcast came in 2009, when the program drew 14.9 million viewers. The low tide mark was a year after the HFPA was forced to cancel its regular ball ceremony due to the writers’ strike in Hollywood in 2008. It rather held a news conference with CNN, E! and TV Guide network that joined NBC to report the winners live. The NBC show that night drew 6 million viewers, while the three cable networks probably teamed up to attract at least one million viewers. In any case, 2008 does not count in measuring how Globes did it compared to previous ceremonies, because it was not an actual ceremony. But even if that happened, there would probably be more people watching the winners unveiled that year than were put on the program this year.
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