Up 54% to 6.9 Million Viewers

The Emmys brought an average 6.87 million viewers to ABC on Sunday night, a 54% rise in total viewers from the record-low 4.3 million who tuned into the most recent ceremony on Fox at the start of this year.

In the key adults 18-49 ratings, the telecast averaged a 1.02 rating, up 17% from 0.87 in January. Per ABC, the 76th Emmys telecast posted the award show’s largest overall audience in there years, since its 2021 airing on CBS. It also outperformed ABC’s previous airing by 8% in total viewers, vs. the COVID virtual telecast in 2020 (6.39 million).

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The January Emmys struggled for viewership, having been postponed from their original September 2023 date due to the Hollywood strikes and forced to air against an NFL playoff game. The most recent “typical” Emmys ceremony in September 2022 brought in 5.9 million viewers — which was considered a flop at the time, a 25% drop from 2021’s 7.4 million. The good news for Sunday’s telecast is that it was able to beat that.

Sunday’s show did air in competition with the NFL, though the Texans-Bears game was of a much lower profile than the playoff game that drew viewers away from the Emmys in January. Disney’s recent dispute with DirecTV, which caused a two-week blackout of Disney-owned stations for DirectTV customers, was originally predicted to impact Emmy viewership, but access to ABC and other networks was restored on Saturday.

All in all, it’s been a string of difficult years for TV’s biggest night. In her review, Variety critic Alison Herman called Sunday’s Emmys a “drab” and “relatively muted affair,” nothing that “it’s hard to make a yearly awards show feel special when it’s staged twice in one year” and that the awards “largely served as a reflection of a less-than-vital moment in TV history, not a counterpoint.”

The show, produced by Jesse Collins Entertainment, still earned some decent marks for hosts Eugene and Dan Levy and also shattered several records — including the most wins ever in a single year for a series (“Shogun,” with 18) and for the most ever in a single year for a comedy (“The Bear,” with 11). The ceremony also had its share of surprises, most notably the final win of the night, for Max’s “Hacks” as comedy series.

The uptick also reps an encouraging sign for awards shows in general; earlier this year ABC also saw an increase in its ratings for the Oscars.