Emmy Ratings Bolster Fox and TV Academy

National ratings confirmed Tuesday that last weekend’s Emmy Awards program made a major comeback in viewership, thus giving an 11th-hour reprieve to the Fox Broadcasting Co., which had become an object of ridicule for letting the TV industry’s most prestigious show die.

With its surprising comeback--the highest rating and share in Fox’s five years of broadcasting the Emmys--Sunday’s awards program, hosted by young performers Jerry Seinfeld, Dennis Miller and Jamie Lee Curtis, became an important benchmark for the 5-year-old network in its struggle for recognition and acceptance.

The established Big Three networks can point to the fact that Sunday’s show still finished slightly behind a prime-time broadcast of the Daytime Emmy Awards on CBS this summer in overall ratings.

But Fox scored a victory nonetheless with its youthful, fast-moving, racy and socially oriented show, despite the black eye of one comedian’s monologue about masturbation, stemming from Pee-wee Herman’s arrest in an adult movie theater. The monologue aired live in the East but was edited out in other areas.

With its back to the wall after last year’s Emmy show, which earned only an 8.2 rating and attracted just 14% of the audience, Fox’s Sunday awards program jumped upward to a 12.5 rating, 22% of the audience--and tied for 11th place among 83 shows on all of the networks last week.

Fox said the telecast was seen by about 18.5 million viewers, up more than 6 million over last year. Despite predictions that the Emmy show would be a sure loser again by being broadcast in the vacation month of August, Fox won the night against the Big Three with the highest-rated special in its brief history.

There is no question that, even with its victory, Fox still is way behind the audience totals of the Big Three in their past Emmy broadcasts, which often drew between 40 million and 60 million viewers, or even more. Even though the audiences of ABC, CBS and NBC have declined, they probably would still attract a larger viewership. But what Sunday established for Fox was further proof that, with proper showmanship, it can perform respectably against the Big Three.

It has already proved this with such entries as “The Simpsons,” “Married . . . With Children,” “In Living Color” and “The Tracey Ullman Show” (an award-winning quality series despite its low ratings).

But the Emmy Awards, which Fox stole from the Big Three by offering a higher bid to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, had become a major thorn in Fox’s vulnerable hide, especially after last year’s fiasco, which placed 58th in the ratings.

In Los Angeles, Sunday’s Emmy Awards were the No. 2 show of the week, trailing only “Roseanne.” In fact, however, it drew a higher share of the audience--32%--than any other program seen in Los Angeles, including such powerhouses as “60 Minutes,” “Cheers” and “Roseanne.”

Even more significantly, the national ratings showing of the Emmys helped Fox to pull within a single rating point for programming for the entire week. ABC had a 9.4, NBC a 9.2, CBS a 9.1 and Fox an 8.2--which was well above its 6.3 average for the season that started last September. While the Big Three fall off sharply during the summer, Fox generally holds its own and makes solid moves with summer counter-programming.

The last time one of the Big Three networks broadcast the Emmys--NBC in 1986--it scored a 23.1 rating and earned 36% of the audience. But with network shares of audience steadily declining, one industry observer suggested that the 36% of five years ago might more likely translate to a 28% share in today’s increasingly fragmented TV world.

Nonetheless, just about everyone in TV agrees that viewers and the industry would be best served if the Emmys returned to the Big Three networks as well as Fox, and negotiations to make that a reality are under way. They were, in fact, under way before last weekend’s Emmy show, but the difference now is that both Fox and the TV academy are in a much stronger position to negotiate their future stakes in the annual awards program.

A week ago, some hard-liners at the networks, which have long resented Fox’s outfoxing them in grabbing the Emmys, were saying that the young network would be a detriment to future Emmy shows because of its disastrous performance.

And the TV academy, which sustains itself by selling TV rights to the Emmys, reportedly was offered a low-ball bid by the Big Three, perhaps as much as two-thirds less than the $9 million that Fox paid for its current three-year contract for the show.

But after Sunday’s ratings performance, Fox--which already has said it will give up its rights to the Emmys in 1992 in favor of a four-network rotation--can make a solid claim that it can deliver a decent-sized audience. And the TV academy appears to be able to demand a higher price than might have been offered for future rights for the Big Three.

Sunday’s show also helped Fox finish No. 1 for the week with 18-to-49-year-old viewers, and it was also No. 1 with viewers 18 to 34--age groups coveted by advertisers. Fox and the TV academy can also claim that added advertising value from their teaming for the weekend broadcast.

The show also did spectacularly well in New York as well as Los Angeles--the nation’s two biggest TV markets.

“It’s a nice feeling for us,” said Peter Chernin, president of the Fox Entertainment Group. “We’re getting great feedback,” he added--except for the startling masturbation monologue, which Fox said was unscripted. Speaking of the show’s overall impact, Chernin said: “It was the things Fox would like to be--a little hipper, at ease and young.”

Chernin said Fox was sticking by its willingness to surrender the 1992 show as the start of a four-network rotation. And Leo Chaloukian, president of the TV academy, said he felt his organization was probably in a better bargaining position.