ABC says ratings for their Emmy Awards show brought in a total of 6.87 million viewers last night.
That’s up 54% from January’s delayed 2023 Emmys on Fox. Not bad!
The numbers were up 17% in viewers age 18-49, too. And that was just on ABC, not any of that streaming stuff aka “other platforms.” Very old fashioned!
Some naysayers criticized the show for being boring, but I thought it went pretty smoothly. Eugene Levy and son Dan Levy were perfectly lovely hosts. The tributes to old shows like “Happy Days” and “The West Wing” also came off very classy. I loved the segment with Viola Davis and Christine Baranski. Billy Crystal was given room to speak at length, and he was charming.
Yes, there were few surprises among the winners, although “Hacks” snatching Best Comedy, and Lisa Colon-Zayas winning Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy for “The Bear.”
Candice Bergen kind of stole the show with her Dan Quayle joke. And the trio from “Only Murders in the Building”– Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez — were a breath of fresh air. So were the four “SNL” performers who roasted an unamused looking Lorne Michaels.
But there’s always something wrong, and as usual it had to with In Memoriam. “Inside Edition” correspondent Jim Moret was pretty unhappy his late father, James Darren, was excluded. Darren starred in big TV shows like “The Time Tunnel” and “TJ Hooker.” He was a star of 60s TV and a huge celebrity.
Moret, who lost his stepfather recently, too, has every right to be upset.
He wrote, “With 200 credits to his name – 150 in television – it is beyond disappointing that #JamesDarren was #snubbed by @theEmmys In Memoriam segment.”
Some people were prematurely upset with the In Memoriam for no reason, as it turns out. Patrick O’Neal ranted an assumption that his father, Ryan O’Neal, would be forgotten. But the “Peyton Place” star was noted right up front.
Also snubbed: Shelly Duvall, although I think of her as a movie person. But really egregious was leaving out Joe Flaherty, a founding member of SCTV. After all, Levy, Short, and Catherine O’Hara — all his lifelong cohorts — were a big party of the Emmys. Not nice.
