Hollywood loves a good comeback story, and the Golden Globes have just made one.
The 2024 Golden Globe Awards, which aired live on CBS on Sunday (Jan. 7), averaged 9.4 million viewers, up 50% from last year. The show achieved its largest audience since 2020, according to Nielsen time zone-adjusted fast national, including out-of-home, ratings for Sunday.
Hollywood’s Party of the Year – the phrase has been trademarked – was Sunday’s most-watched entertainment program.
Hosted by comedian Jo Koy, the Globes reached the largest livestreaming audience for an awards show across Paramount+ and other CBS platforms since the 65th annual Grammy Awards in February 2023.
It was the second largest livestreamed CBS special event on Paramount+ ever in terms of AMA (average minute audience) and reach.
On social media, the Golden Globes dominated Sunday night with nearly 30 billion potential impressions, ranking as the No. 1 program of the night based on total interactions.
Three years ago, the Globes were rocked by scandal about a lack of diversity in the organization and ethical lapses. It was so bad that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who hosted that year for the fourth time, openly criticized the show while hosting the show. Fey said, “We all know awards shows are stupid. The point is, even with stupid things, inclusivity is important and there are no Black members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. … You have to change that.”
The 2021 show’s ratings plummeted, from 18.32 million viewers in 2020 to just 6.91 million viewers. That marked the first time the show’s viewership had dropped below 14 million viewers since it moved from TBS to NBC in 1996. Whether it was the controversy or the disruptive effect of the pandemic isn’t clear, but the ratings tanked, even in the hands of top-tier hosts like Fey and Poehler.
Two years ago, the Golden Globes were held as a private dinner, with no television or streaming component. It seemed like the show, which originated in 1944, might be too damaged to ever recover. But the idea of the show – a fun, loose event where seemingly every big star in film and TV (and sometimes music too) are jam-packed into one ballroom – was simply too good for Hollywood to let it go.
The show was back on NBC last year, but reached just 6.3 million viewers. This year it moved over to CBS for a show that lived up to its old reputation as Hollywood’s free-wheeling party of the year, with such A-listers as Meryl, Oprah, Taylor and Bruce in attendance.
The champagne that flowed so freely last night in the Grand Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., is flowing again in offices at the Golden Globes and CBS. The show appears to have survived its brush with death.
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