Sunday evening’s Primetime Emmy Awards attracted their lowest audience in history:
After broadcast TV execs received word about the ratings on their beloved Emmy Awards yesterday morning, they flung themselves on casting couches and chewed the cushions in an ecstasy of grief.
Sunday’s 60th annual Primetime Emmy Awards, celebrating all that’s best and brightest on cable TV (and broadcast series that do cable-like ratings) and featuring superannuated stars of ’70s shows and a five-headed reality-TV host, had inexplicably attracted the franchise’s smallest audience in its history.
and to add insult to the injury most of the top awards were bestowed on cable programs with relatively low viewerships:
A mere 12.2 million viewers caught the 3-hour 8-minute orgy of trophy dispensing and politically charged speechifying. And while that’s a terrific number for many of the night’s big winners — AMC’s “Mad Men” averages about 925,000 viewers; HBO’s “John Adams” and FX’s “Damages,” 2 million-ish; AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” 1.4 million; Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” 1.6 million; and NBC’s “30 Rock,” 6.5 million — it’s just another insult for the broadcast networks that for years have shelled out a license fee for permission to broadcast what has become a cable infomercial.
HBO bagged 26 Emmys this year, including 13 for “John Adams,” which makes it the winningest miniseries in Emmy history. The pay-cabler’s “Recount” took another three.
AMC’s awards included the historic “Mad Men” win for best drama series — the first time a basic-cable series has won a best-series trophy — and “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston’s surprise win for best drama-series actor.
The reasons for this reversal of fortunes are many. For one thing we’re up to here with award shows these days. On any given evening you can barely channel surf without stumbling over an awards show these days. I doubt that the appetite for them is insatiable.
Also I think we can confidently observe that the “magazinization of television” is complete. Something like 60% of households in the United States have cable and there’s a greater variety of programming available—something for everyone. The writers’ strike last spring pounded the final nail into the coffin of network television’s hegemony, squandering years of loyal following which won’t be recovered readily. That was the case in the aftermath of the last writers’ strike which created the opening for the flood of reality TV that now dominates.
Writing is important. That’s the secret of the success of shows like The Sopranos and The Wire. It might be nice if television started drawing from outside the extremely narrow demographic from which it currently draws its writers, too.
