• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 6, 2022

Don’t expect viewership for the Grammys and Oscars to suddenly start shooting up in the years to come just because of this year’s upticks.

That may be more true, based on the data, for the Grammys than the Oscars. But for both of them, the huge audiences of yesteryear are unlikely to be seen again.

The two shows aired a week apart this year -- the Grammys this past Sunday on CBS and the Oscars a week earlier on ABC.

The TV Blog concedes that Grammy viewership this year just barely qualifies as an improvement over last year.

This year’s show drew an estimated audience of 8.93 million (according to Nielsen fast nationals), which was up from 8.8 million last year. 

Viewership for the Oscars grew a lot more. The Oscar show attracted an audience estimated at 16.6 million, up from 10.4 million in 2021.

Last year’s Oscars happened to be the lowest-rated in history. And although this year’s viewership was much improved, it still ranks as the second lowest-rated Oscars ever.

As it happens, an audience of 16.6 million -- which once upon a time was a typical number for reasonably successful prime-time TV shows -- ranges from rare to nonexistent on TV today.

So for that reason alone, ABC and the Academy are likely content with the audience their show drew this year. They may even be feeling optimistic for next year too. 

But this year’s increases aside, the point of this blog is that ratings for both the Oscars and the Grammys have plummeted significantly in recent years.

Just two years ago, in 2020, the Grammy audience was 18.7 million. As recently as 2012, it was just shy of 40 million.

This year’s numbers and last year’s might be an indication that the Grammys have hit a plateau and just might stay there. 

Where the Oscars are concerned, this year’s uptick at least put a halt temporarily to the steady decline of this annual event over the last two decades.

In that time, there have been years that like this year, saw similar audience upticks. But overall, the Oscars have been on a losing track. In 2020, the estimated audience was 23.6 million. In 2019, it was 29.6 million.

Despite the usual complaints that viewers and TV critics air every year about the quality of the Oscar telecasts, you still have to give the network and the Oscars production team credit for applying their best efforts to putting on an A-list show, from the stars on hand to the Oscar stage itself.

The same goes for the Grammys, which like the Oscars, did not lack for star power and glitz this year.

And yet, the show’s lowly audience indicates that big stars, far-out fashions and top-drawer staging is just not enough today to draw the big audiences of past eras.

It’s like everything else in the overcrowded sectors of our various media, including thousands of video content choices, a million or more podcasts, social media, news web sites, video games and whatever else is out there soaking up people’s time.

With all of that, who has time for the Grammys and Oscars?