The 71st Primetime Emmy Awards aired live Sunday night (September 22) from its new network home, FOX, and while the move was trumpeted by the academy, ratings suggest viewers couldn’t have cared less.
Much like this year’s Oscars, the Emmys opted to go host-free and relied solely on a star-studded list of presenters to keep the show moving and deliver the punchlines. Unknown to the ceremony at the time, their ratings would see them become the punchline.
Ringing in their lowest numbers to date, this year’s figure goes down in history as the first time in history viewership dipped below 7 million.
“Watched by 6.9 million viewers from 8 PM to just after 11 PM ET, the hostless ceremony pulled in the smallest audience for any Emmys ever. That’s smack is a 32% fall in sets of overall eyeballs from the Monday airing of the show on NBC last year, and a 39% drop from the show’s previous Sunday airing on CBS in 2017. In addition, the decline this year from the last time Fox had the Emmys in 2015 is a hard-to-swallow 42%.”