The ratings for The Emmys were worse than last year, which were also worse than the previous year

By Sam Barsanti | September 22, 2020 | 2:45am

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The ratings for The Emmys were worse than last year, which were also worse than the previous year

The 72nd Emmy Awards Screenshot: YouTube

This year’s Emmy Awards went off surprisingly well, considering that the nominees were all remote and Skyping in with laptops and webcams lent to them by the Emmys producers (“Skyping in” is what we used to call “Being on a Zoom call”), with some of the Friends showing up for a reunion, Schitt’s Creek winning all of the awards, and host Jimmy Kimmel delivering a pretty solid/weird monologue, but apparently (relatively) very few people actually tuned in to check out what Kimmel had deemed the “Pandemmys.” In fact, according to The Wrap, The Emmys set a record this year for the least amount of viewers in Emmys history… just like the show did last year. And the year before that.

The Emmys are on a bit of a downward trend, as are most things these days, so at least Kimmel and ABC can take some comfort in the fact that it’s not necessarily their fault—after all, the 2019 show was the one without a host, so apparently people don’t care if there’s a host or not. They just won’t watch either way. Numbers-wise, The Wrap says 6.1 million people watched the show this year, down 29 percent from last year’s show, though there was a dramatic uptick in the amount of “social interactions” that people were having about the Emmys on social media platforms—up 108 percent from 2019, though it’s unclear what that actually means. The Wrap chalks this up to a general increase in the number of people using social media, which seems fair, since it’s not like people can go out and hug strangers like they were doing in 2019. All that’s left is tweeting about the Emmys without necessarily watching the Emmys, and Americans are definitely still doing that.