The award for the lowest TV audience in 27 years goes to Tuesday night’s Golden Globes telecast on NBC.
The awards show drew 6.3 million viewers, its lowest total since 1996, according to The New York Times. In 2021, the last time the show aired, it attracted 6.9 million viewers, according to Reuters.
Both of those numbers are far below the show in its heyday. The Times reported that about 18 million viewers watched the last pre-pandemic show in 2020 and that from 2010 through 2020, Nielsen numbers put the audience at between 17 million viewers and 20 million viewers.
NBC did not televise the show last year because of ethics and diversity issues with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which gives out the awards. This year, the show moved from its Sunday night spot to a Tuesday to avoid a conflict with the “Sunday Night Football” telecast.
Tuesday night’s show avoided setting the record for the show’s smallest audience, set in 2008 when only 6 million viewers tuned in during the Hollywood writers’ strike, according to the New York Post.
The show began with comedian Jerrod Carmichael hitting a racial note by saying that as host he was asked to be the “black face of an embattled white organization. Life really comes at you fast.”
He said he agreed to “take the white people money.”
“This show, the Golden Globe Awards, did not air last year because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which I won’t say they were a racist organization, but they didn’t have a single black member until George Floyd di-ed. So do with that information what you will,” Carmichael said.
To many, the show was a celebration of wokeness to be avoided.
The audience decline comes amid two trends noted by the Los Angeles Times.
“Some TV-industry veterans believe the politicization of awards shows, which have become earnest affairs in recent years amid the social upheaval in the country, is a turnoff for traditional TV viewers looking for escapist entertainment,” the Times wrote.
Also, it noted, awards shows do not get the viewers they once did. For example, the Emmys in September logged a 25 percent decline in viewers, according to Variety.
USA Today television critic Kelly Lawler said the time may have come to end the ordeal of the annual show.
“The Golden Globes came back last night. We were better off without them,” she wrote.
“The show is a relic, as cheaply gilded as the gaudy statues the HFPA hands out,” Lawler said. “The speeches were way too long at the start and droned on longer from there, pushing an already interminable event well over the three-hour mark. If Carmichael’s jokes landed only sporadically, the presenters’ barely touched the ground.”
“Many times over the past two decades, awards shows proved must-see TV,” she said, adding, “Those days are over. Maybe it’s time to rethink the awards show as an event altogether. The Globes would be a good place to start.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
