The Tony Awards on CBS had pretty bad ratings, just 2.65 million people. And who cares? The two hour show from 9 to 11pm was beautifully produced and well worth watching again. But CBS had it all screwed up by not just broadcasting in real time across the country. Also, the Paramount Plus feed was apparently a mess on the west coast for people not using Roku. (We had no trouble with it.)
The Tony Awards offered all the biggest stars doing their best work so that wasn’t an issue. The producers, Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss, made lemonade out of lemons. After all, only 16 shows were eligible. Half of them were bad, the other half had closed. All the Best Score nominees were plays, not musicals. How ridiculous is that? “A Christmas Carol,” a seasonal entry, won a bunch of awards it would never have won. But the producers made it work.
On another ratings front, the scammish Global Citizen concert scored just 1.55 million viewers showing clips from their egregious day of spending millions on rock stars and nothing on the poor or the hungry. The rock stars are using Global Citizen to look like activists and get attention for their music. The Global Citizen execs are using the rock stars for big salaries and hobnobbing. The whole thing is absurd.
