It may be TV’s golden age, but it’s also the NFL’s and in a head to head contest, the NFL clearly prevails.
Sunday night’s primetime broadcast of the 67th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards on Fox drew the awards broadcast’s lowest audience on record — 11.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen’s preliminary national estimates. That’s down nearly 4 million viewers from last year’s show on NBC, which aired in late August before the NFL season got underway.
Meanwhile, NBC’s Sunday Night Football averaged a 16.3 rating/27 share among metered-market households. The match-up between the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers scored the second-best Week 2 metered-market ratings in SNF history, behind a game featuring the New York Giants facing the Dallas Cowboys on Sept. 20, 2009. Sunday Night Football also climbed 16% compared to last year’s Week 2 game, which saw the Chicago Bears face off against the San Francisco 4934s.
The Emmys’ previous low for the Emmys came in 1990 and 2008, with an audience of 12.3 million first on Fox and then on ABC, reports Variety. The previous total-viewer high of 17.8 million came in 2013 on CBS.
While that number marks a new low for the Emmys, the telecast already isn’t that popular among awards show viewers. In the past year, they’ve come in sixth after ABC’s Oscars, CBS’ Grammys, NBC’s Golden Globes, ABC’s CMAs and CBS’ ACMs.
Read more: Variety
Brief Take: One factor that industry watchers estimate hurts the Emmys is the fact that critically acclaimed but not necessarily popular shows tend to win most of the awards, making the show less fun for the typical TV watcher. Airing the telecast against the NFL also put it at a huge disadvantage.
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