The 47th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards, which were broadcast on CBS last night, landed 3.1 million viewers. The Friday, June 26, ceremony was the first time that the show had been broadcast on a major television network in nearly a decade.
Hot on the heels of the exciting news that last night's Daytime Emmy Awards were trending on Twitter comes news that the CBS broadcast of the star-studded ceremony drew 3.1 million viewers. That audience number, according to Nielsen's Live + Same Day Ratings, is a huge jump from the 900,000 who tuned in to the Emmy ceremony when it aired on Pop five years ago, the last time that the awards were broadcast on television and not just live-streamed.
What's more impressive is that those ratings do not include any delayed DVR, on-demand, or streaming views. Many primetime television programs now base their ratings on the number of viewers that have watched over the course of a week -- or even a month.
As reported in Soap Central's list of the 47th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards winners, CBS' The Young and the Restless was the winning-most soap with eight total wins, including for Outstanding Drama Series. The Bold and the Beautiful and ABC's General Hospital snagged four wins each, while NBC's Days of our Lives managed to take home two Emmy wins.
Friday's Emmy presentation was hosted by the ladies of The Talk and included presenters ranging from soap opera favorites like Y&R's Melody Thomas Scott (Nikki Newman) and GH's Maurice Benard (Sonny Corinthos) to primetime names like Kelsey Grammer.
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences previously announced that many of the Digital Drama categories will be streamed in a separate virtual ceremony on July 19th. Children's, Animation, Family Viewing, and Lifestyle Programming categories will be streamed in an additional virtual ceremony on July 26th. More details and information regarding these programs will be released at a future date.
In terms of how well the Daytime Emmys broadcast did in comparison to the other network shows that aired at the same time, TV Line reports that Fox's Friday Night SmackDown sat at 2.2 million, The CW's Masters of Illusion had 795K viewers, and ABC's 20/20 delivered Friday's largest total audience with 3.5 million viewers.
It is unclear if the ratings will be enough to convince CBS to air the Emmys in primetime next year, but an interesting nugget of information came out of a post-show interview with Forbes.
"[Associated Television International (ATI) President] David McKenzie really made the CBS deal happen before the pandemic broke," noted ATI's Jim Romanovich. "So, this was always planned as a huge, live event on a Big 3 network. Once COVID-19 hit, everyone was wondering what to do. While we knew it had to be virtual, we were not sure how to do it. Then David came up with the idea of pre-taping every acceptance speech so that the broadcast would be a complete surprise to both the audience and the winners."
Early in 2020, the Daytime Emmys announced that they would begin broadcasting their awards ceremonies on their own-streaming platform, and many fans were resigned to the fact that this new platform meant that the Daytime Emmys would never be seen on network television again. However, Romanovich's statement seemingly indicates that the Daytime Emmys were slated to air on television after the platform announcement and before the pandemic.
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This article has been updated to include comments from ATI and an explanation of the ratings.
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