The Emmy awards is one of the premier award shows next to the Oscars but strangely its popularity seems to be waning in terms of viewership.
On Monday night an estimated 5.9 million people tuned in to watch it, a figure that is even smaller than at peak pandemic levels two years ago.
The Nielsen company said the ceremony honoring television’s best saw super low figures compared to even 2021 which had 7.4 million viewers.
One reason for this could be because it was screened on a Monday night. It had a rating of 1.0 among adults aged between 18 and 49, the lowest ever key demo stat for the Emmys.
Big winners this year were HBO’s Succession in the drama category, Ted Lasso for comedy, and HBO’s The White Lotus for anthology series. The number one network for the 2022 Emmys was HBO Max.
The award ceremony was broadcasted live from the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, California.
Incidentally it isn’t just the Emmy awards that saw a huge decline in viewership. The prestigious Grammy awards saw a similar decline this year with 9.23 million viewers, a 51% drop from 2020. The music award show isn’t as popular as it once was. Could it be that people have lost interest in big red carpet award ceremonies altogether?
However there is a possibility that people are watching it on streaming platforms.
Here’s some interesting trivia about the Emmy awards (taken from Readers Digest):
Winners must pay $400 if they wish to take the statue home. Because the trophies don’t come cheap the Television Academy charges extra for these.
The shortest Emmy acceptance speech was actually 11 words long. In 2013 Merrit Wever made the most concise speech ever for her win in Nurse Jackie.
The statuette is actually modeled after a TV engineer’s wife. Louis McManus a television engineer designed the trophy based on his wife’s figure.
The first person to ever win an Emmy was actually a ventriloquist. In 1949, Shirley Dinsdale won the award at 20 (together with her puppet called Judy Splinters). The duo would later go on to appear in a children’s television series.
Jackie Kennedy was the first First Lady to ever receive an Emmy for her televised tour of the White House.
Bettie White (of Golden Girls fame) has received nominations in six different decades, winning in four of them.
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