Photo: Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for Hollywood Forei
With few stars and even fewer nominated for the blockbuster, America practically ignored Sunday night’s Golden Globe broadcast. By Nielsen, a not-so-good average audience of just 6.9 million watched Tina Fey and Amy Poehler host the bicastal procedures on NBC, just a third the size of the 2020 audience (18.3 million) and by far the least attended ceremony in modern history of globes. Demonstration ratings were even worse, with the three-hour Zoomathon reaching a score of 1.5 with adults under 50, a 68% decline from the previous year (4.7). Although prize ratings fell during COVID, no major event collapsed as 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 of upcoming Grammy and Oscar broadcasts.
There is simply no way to hide how terrible these numbers are. Although Globes managed to overcome last year’s pandemic Emmy, it was not much: TV’s biggest honors attracted just 6.1 million viewers at ABC last September, also a record for that program. But the Emmy dropped a much more modest 11 percent of its pre-COVID audience, and in recent years, the Globes has delivered two to three times as many viewers as the Emmy. What’s more, while Emmys rotate among the top four chains, NBC pays a huge premium for Globes exclusivity. In 2018, Variety reported that Peacock agreed to pay $ 60 million a year for Globes as part of a long-term licensing agreement; in contrast, most reports estimate that networks pay for Emmys at around $ 10 million a year.
To be fair to Globes and NBC, the decline for last year’s Emmys was small, in part because the show has suffered a much more consistent audience erosion during the Netflix era, leaving it with little more room for decline. Performance-based music awards have seen much greater success in recent months, with audiences dropping between a third and a half compared to previous years. But the Globes’ collapse was much more spectacular and painful, in part because NBC invested so much in promoting the program and because it marked the return of veterinarians Peacock Fey and Poehler as hosts. The network and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association decided to invest the resources in the broadcast, although all signs pointed to a likely Nielsen disaster: COVID meant a series of film nominees who had never heard of or were ever shown in theaters, as well as inability of the stars to mix and mingle inside a ballroom. In addition, the week before the Globes ceremony was dominated by the results of an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, which renewed questions about the legitimacy of the awards and revealed a lack of diversity among the program’s voting body.
As for Sunday’s audience, the previous low-audience record for a Globes broadcast came in 2009, when the program drew 14.9 million viewers. The low watermark came a year after HFPA was forced to cancel its usual ballroom ceremony because of the Hollywood writers’ strike in 2008. Instead, it gave a press conference with CNN, E! and TV Guide joined NBC to report the winners live. The NBC special that night drew 6 million viewers, while the three cable networks combined are likely to attract at least one million viewers. Anyway, when measuring the performance of this year’s Globo compared to previous ceremonies, 2008 does not count, as it was not a real ceremony. But even if it did, more people are likely to see the winners revealed that year than tuned into this year’s show.
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