Emmy Awards TV Ratings: The Results Are In
TV ratings for the 2017 Emmy Awards broadcast on CBS Sunday night have now been compiled.
The Los Angeles-based event, which most TV critics likened to a Donald Trump roast and featured a cameo by his former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, nearly hit rock bottom in terms of overall viewership.
“With Stephen Colbert as host, the three-hour extravaganza barely spared a moment from ripping Trump’s presidency,” the New York Post claimed.
In the advertiser-coveted 18-49 age demographic, the Colbert-hosted prime-time Emmys tanked. Some of the shows that received honors probably didn’t help matters either. Most of America has never watched Hulu’s dystopian drama The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, which netted five awards, including best actress for Elisabeth Moss (Peggy from Mad Men) or HBO’s Big Little Lies, another winner.
Deadline Hollywood has the details on the Emmy Awards ratings.
“With 11.38 million viewers tuning into the 69th annual Primetime Emmy Awards is even with last year’s show on ABC, which was the all-time low. The 2016 show was down 5% from the 2015 show, which was the previous low. Among adults 18-49, last night’s Emmys snagged a 2.5 rating. That’s down 10% from the Jimmy Kimmel hosted show of last year, the previous demo low. Full of repeated swipes at Donald Trump from Colbert and almost everyone else on-stage last night, the 2017 Emmys also faced the well-followed Atlanta Falcons and Green Bay Packers over on Sunday Night Football.”
Fueled by the NFL game, NBC won the night for the ratings book. That said, the TV universe is increasingly fragmented, with hundreds of channels to choose from, along with the issue of cord-cutters, which makes it difficult for any show to achieve dominance. For various reasons, which may include the national anthem player protests, NFL ratings are also down for the second-consecutive year. Against that backdrop, many media industry observers have suggested that when most viewers tune in to entertainment or sports programming, they seek entertainment- or sports-related content that is unrelated to politics.
President Trump himself chimed in on Twitter that the bad Emmy ratings left him feeling sad.
I was saddened to see how bad the ratings were on the Emmys last night – the worst ever. Smartest people of them all are the "DEPLORABLES."
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2017
Parenthetically, Alec Baldwin won the award for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series (Saturday Night Live) presumably for his Trump impersonation and chided Trump for never winning an Emmy on his own.
One TV pundit described the 2017 television industry prime-time ceremony as “the most political Emmys ever,” which, he suggested, included honoring shows like The Handmaid’s Tale or Atlanta apparently because of their overt political agenda, Fox News noted.
Ratings for last night's #Emmys hit all-time low.
No surprise, as Hollywood continues to alienate half the country. https://t.co/y5y7tEp0a4
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) September 18, 2017
During his long career in the pre-politics media spotlight as a prominent real estate developer and reality show star, Donald Trump — a former Democrat and independent who ran for president on the GOP ticket — regularly mingled with New York and Hollywood celebrities, and they with him. It’s only after he became a political candidate that the longtime host of the Apprentice franchise on NBC, based on various crosscurrents, became unacceptable to many of those on the liberal/progressive-leaning show business circuit. In addition to the Emmys, several other recent awards galas have provided a platform for Trump criticism.
Did you watch the Emmy Awards on Sunday night?
[Image by Dan Steinberg/Invision for the Television Academy/AP Images]
