An average 9.4m viewers tuned into Sunday’s 2024 Golden Globes ceremony on CBS in a 49.2% climb on last year’s 6.3m according to early figures from Nielsen.
The show drew its largest audience since 18.3m back in 2020 after last year’s ceremony delivered the Globes’ lowest ever ratings on former broadcast partner NBC.
Sunday’s numbers on CBS will have been helped by the show’s return to its traditional Sunday night slot (the 2023 event aired on January 10 – a Tuesday), and the fact that it followed an NFL American Football double-header.
However, achieving the highest audience of the past four years must be viewed as a slight achievement at best given the pandemic’s severe impact on production, distribution and public gatherings in the recent past.
Compounding this, against a backdrop of declining TV viewership of Hollywood awards shows, was the damning 2021 exposé in the Los Angeles Times of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the controversial group which used to run the Globes until it was disbanded in spring 2023.
The Times report led to a de facto boycott of the HFPA while NBC did not broadcast the 2022 ceremony, which took place behind closed doors.
Golden Globes ratings still trail by some margin the mid-to-high teens average of a decade of shows leading up to 2019.
Separately, Sunday’s show host Jo Koy has responded to critical reviews and disapproval on social media of his performance, which was singled out in particular for a joke about Taylor Swift which fell flat and did not appear to impress the singer-songwriter, who was in the audience at Beverly Hilton.
“The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL?” Koy said on Sunday. “At the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift” in reference to Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce.
Speaking on ABC’s GMA3 on Monday Koy admitted he was deflated by the response to his routine, which he noted he only had 10 days to prepare.
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