Golden Globes Ratings Decline Slightly to 9.3 Million Viewers

The Golden Globe Awards drew an average of 9.3 million viewers for CBS on Sunday night, a modest decline from last year, according to Nielsen.

The good news for the Globes is that the award show, on life support not long ago, has managed to stop the bleeding. Last year’s ceremony drew 9.4 million viewers, the first year it had broadcast on CBS.

However, the ratings are far from the Globes’ audience of 20 million or so viewers it drew in the 2010s. Ratings for the Globes plummeted after the pandemic and a number of self-inflicted scandals that had nearly killed off the event entirely.

The Globes also had formidable competition on Sunday. NBC broadcast the regular season finale of “Sunday Night Football” between the Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings, which attracted more than 25 million viewers, Nielsen said.

The award show’s slight decline stands in contrast with ratings for other major live events, which have generally been growing. The Oscars have had three consecutive years of viewership growth, as is the case with the Grammys. (Both will be put back to the test again soon — the Grammys will air on CBS on Feb. 2, and the Oscars return to ABC on March 2.) Viewership also increased for the Emmy Awards in September.

Critics gave Sunday’s telecast high marks. The New York Times critic Jason Zinoman praised the ceremony’s host, Nikki Glaser, for her “stellar monologue,” and Variety said the show regained “its chaotic glory.” The reviews were considerably kinder than last year’s broadcast when critics panned the event, and the show’s host, Jo Koy.

On Sunday, Globes voters handed awards out to a number of films, but “The Brutalist” and “Emilia Pérez” took top honors. The television awards were relatively ho-hum, with “Shogun,” “Hacks” and “Baby Reindeer” taking the top awards, just as they had at the Emmys in September.

Winners and presenters avoided third-rail political topics on Sunday, including the incoming Trump administration, a departure from past Globes ceremonies.

Nielsen ratings were not made available to the public on Monday, as is the usual protocol after a major live event. Normally, networks order up preliminary Nielsen ratings for a fee the day after a live event, and then release the figures (and try to put a positive spin on them) on their own.

But Paramount, CBS’s parent company, has been mired in a monthslong contract dispute with Nielsen, the industry’s longtime go-to supplier of ratings data. CBS no longer has access to Nielsen’s ratings figures, and Nielsen provided the final numbers to its existing clients on Tuesday morning.

On Monday evening, CBS and Dick Clark Productions, the producer of the event, issued data measured by VideoAmp, a Nielsen rival. CBS and Dick Clark Productions said that 10.1 million people had watched the Globes, citing VideoAmp and proprietary data.