Right Off the Bat, Emmys Audience Shrinks

The twice-postponed nighttime Emmy Awards found themselves overmatched Sunday by the seventh game of the World Series, delivering the smallest audience for an Emmy ceremony since the then-fledgling Fox network carried the broadcast in 1990.

That said, the Emmys held up reasonably well in light of the inordinate competition. Preliminary data from Nielsen Media Research shows the three-hour broadcast averaging just a little more than 17 million viewers, representing CBS’ biggest Sunday-night audience since televising the Super Bowl in January.

Overall viewing of the Emmys dropped more than 20% from last year on ABC--when Garry Shandling hosted the show--but finished within half a million viewers of 1999, when the telecast aired on Fox.

An estimated 39.1 million people, meanwhile, were watching the World Series at any given moment, the biggest audience for baseball since the Fall Classic went to a decisive Game 7 in 1991. Those viewing, in fact, periodically included those attending the Emmys in the Shubert Theatre, who were treated to glimpses of the game during commercial breaks.

Normally broadcast in September before the official television season begins, the Emmys traditionally face minimal competition.

By contrast, Sunday’s telecast aired not only against the World Series in much of the country but also against the NBC miniseries “Uprising” and the hit movie “Toy Story 2” on ABC, which nearly matched the Emmy audience in their overlapping hour. ABC opted to schedule a repeat of its Emmy-nominated drama “The Practice” at the last minute from 9 to 11 p.m.

In New York, where the Emmys played directly opposite baseball, results were not surprisingly lopsided. The New York-Arizona showdown attracted 38.6% of homes in the viewing area, compared with 11.5% watching the Emmys. Even on the West Coast, however, where the World Series started at 5 p.m., the game drew a larger audience than the Emmys.

In Los Angeles, an estimated 23.6% of homes--or roughly 1.25 million households in the region--tuned in baseball, compared with 14.7% of homes, or 780,000, viewing the Emmys.

A similar pattern held true in San Francisco, where ratings were somewhat higher for both the awards and the game.

Attracting such a huge audience should be a boon to Fox, which extensively used its playoff coverage as a platform to promote the network’s new series and lineup of programs for the November rating sweeps.

The Emmy suspense was somewhat preempted by Fox Sports’ decision to list Emmy winners on the screen as they were announced, meaning baseball viewers in the Pacific and Mountain time zones were notified in advance of results of the tape-delayed Emmy broadcast.

The move apparently was directed by David Hill, chairman and chief executive of Fox Sports Television Group, after Emmy host Ellen DeGeneres joked in her opening monologue that she would give Game 7 updates though Fox wouldn’t apprise viewers of Emmy results.

A Fox spokesman said the network saw the updates as a service to the audience and “didn’t intend at all to diminish the enjoyment of the Emmys for viewers on the West Coast.”

He added that the network did not receive any complaints from viewers.