Emmy Awards: number of viewers 2022

In 2022, around 5.92 million people watched the Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony in the United States. This figure marked an all-time low in viewership for the Emmys, which were at their most popular between the early 1990s and early 2000s.

Emmy ratings hit record low

The 74th Primetime Emmy Awards drew the smallest audience in the history of the telecast. It was the first time that the viewership of television’s biggest night dropped below six million viewers – a threshold that not even the hybrid ceremony of 2020 had previously undercut. For comparison, over 21 million viewers tuned in to watch the live event in 1994 and 2000, highlighting how drastically audience interest has declined since then. Another factor contributing to the show’s poor performance in 2022 was its Monday night time slot, which was chosen to avoid conflict with NBC’s Sunday Night Football.

Spotlight on other awards shows

The Emmys are not the only awards ceremony to have lost viewers and relevance over the past few years. Even the Oscars, Hollywood’s most renowned celebration, have failed to draw audiences’ attention recently. In 2022, the number of Academy Awards viewers stood at 15.36 million, and even though this figure marked a visible upswing from the previous year, the audience was still only half the size it used to be back in 2017. A similar downward trend has also been unfolding at the Grammys. Less than 10 million viewers tuned in to watch the show in 2021 and 2022, whereas this number used to surpass 25 million in the early 2010s.