Sunday’s telecast of the “67th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards” has drawn the show’s smallest audience on record — 11.9 million viewers — according to preliminary national estimates from Nielsen that are adjusted for time zone differences. It was down nearly 4 million viewers from last year’s show on NBC (15.6 million), which aired on a Monday in late August and didn’t have to face an NFL game.
The previous recorded total-viewer low for the show was 12.3 million in both 1990 (its first year on Fox) and 2008 on ABC. The 1974 Emmys on ABC likely drew a smaller audience, but a total-viewer count wasn’t available, according to Nielsen; that year’s show was seen in 6.85 million homes, which is the smallest tune-in of the past 60 years. The total-viewer high in recent years remains the 17.8 million in 2013 on CBS, and the largest audience on record was the nearly 36 million who watched NBC’s telecast in 1986.
The Emmys are merely the sixth most popular awards show of the past year. They trail the Oscars on ABC (37.3 million), the Grammys on CBS (24.8 million), the Golden Globes on NBC (19.3 million), the CMAs on ABC (16.3 million) and the ACMs on CBS (16.0 million), while they come in ahead of the AMAs (11.6 million) and Billboard Music Awards (11.2 million), both on ABC.
