The Emmys vs. the Audience: Which Shows People Actually Watch

0:00Hey, it's Danny Kelly, and it's officially fantasy football season, which means the Ringer Fantasy Football Show is back with the latest news from around the NFL and everything you need to get ready for the fantasy football season. So join us at the Ringer Fantasy Football Show on Spotify or on our new YouTube channel. This episode is brought to you by Holiday Inn by IHG. Everyone knows Holiday Inn, right? Or they think they do. Because though they have the same name, they've got a whole new energy. They kept the global icon status and upgraded pretty much everything else. We're talking modern rooms with real reset mode vibes, spaces that feel like your living room, just a little more low-key chic, and dining done right, from breakfast to dinner and drinks.

0:42Whether you're traveling for work or getting away for a minute, it's comfort that hits different. So yeah, Holiday Inn. It's a new day and a new stay. Book your next day at HolidayInn.com. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, campaigns slow down, insights get buried, and opportunities get missed. That's why Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most.

1:22To learn more, check out Accenture.com slash Spotify. It is Friday, September 12th. We had some news yesterday. The Journal reported that the Ellison family, they just bought Paramount. They're now preparing a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, as I predicted they would on this very show. We're going to wait until Monday to discuss that with Lucas, our Monday guy. So tune in then for that discussion. Today, it's Emmy's weekend. Still a very big deal in Hollywood. Craig and I will be there on Sunday. Say hello if you see us. There's always some surprises in the winners. This year, the big mystery is the drama series race between Severance and The Pit.

1:58I actually think The Pit will win that one. But today we're talking about the real winners of the Emmy weekend. The reason for all the campaigning and hoopla in the first place. The viewership. It's not a secret that the most popular shows are not usually the ones that win awards. If so, CSI and Blue Bloods would be the Emmy Hall of Fame winners. But it does happen. Friends and Seinfeld and The Office all won the top comedy series Emmy once. Frazier was a big player back in the day. It's a lot rarer in the peak TV era, though, although Shogun was a pretty big hit for Hulu and it won the drama series last year.

2:31Today, we're going to look at some numbers and look at the Emmys from the different perspective of who's watching these shows, how the ratings compare to the costs of the shows and the dreaded word efficiency, and maybe most important, which shows got the biggest boosts from their Emmy nominations. For that, we've got Julie Alexander back on the show. Julia works with me at Puck, and she's a streaming video analyst. She crunched these numbers that we got from Nielsen based on minutes viewed in the US. Today, it's the real Emmy winners as voted by the actual viewers. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

3:10Okay, we are here with Julia Alexander, my colleague at Puck, data analyst extraordinaire. Welcome back. Thank you for having me. You're on the list of most frequent guests. I mean, Lucas is the champion, of course, but you're up there. It's like you and Rich Greenfield and a couple others we keep having back. Always good. All right. So the Emmys this weekend, big deal. There's lots of prognostication out there. Everyone's got their picks. We're not going to do that today. I want to focus on the business element. I want to focus on who is actually watching these shows. because ultimately that's how these networks and streamers justify their obsession with awards.

3:52They say, well, it translates into viewers. It translates into buzz. Having the Emmy stamp on a show can turn a moderate show into a hit, can bring attention to something that people wouldn't otherwise take a chance on, which I do believe is true. But I want to look at the numbers and just get into who is actually watching these shows. So we're going to go through some data that Nielsen put out earlier this week. They crunched all the numbers for each of the shows. They also did some research on actors and kind of what their streaming numbers are. But I want to look at the Nielsen numbers on streaming for the nominated shows.

4:33All right. And you have this data, too. So we're going to kind of discuss. Does that make sense? Totally. Now, with the caveat here that obviously a lot of these shows would be very popular if they did not get Emmy attention, people are not watching The Last of Us because it got Emmy nominations. They're watching it because it's freaking zombies, right? So let's go into that. But the awards buzz does help. Outstanding drama series, okay? And this is ratings information from June 1st, 2024 through May 31st, 2025. That is the Emmy eligibility period for the shows that are nominated this weekend at the Emmys.

5:14Okay. The most viewed show during that period is, drumroll, The White Lotus. Shocking. HBO Max. 210 million hours viewed. Pretty good. Yeah. I would not have guessed that. I mean, what we have to note here is that Nielsen does not say if that is just the current season that is eligible for an Emmy or if that's all seasons. The White Lotus has the ability to bring in viewers who want to rewatch, who are catching up with the zeitgeist of most recent season and are now digging into the past. And so I think that was actually less surprising to me than my favorite Emmy contender, not to play favorites, but The Pit.

5:56I think The Pit for me really is the Emmy success story of the year. All right. Well, that is the fourth on the list, also an HBO Max show. That one has 128.5 million hours. It only has one season. And it was fourth on the list. It goes White Lotus, Severance, The Last of Us, and then The Pit on that list. Then it's after that, Paradise, the Hulu show, The Diplomat on Netflix, Andor on Disney, and Slow Horses on Apple TV. So why are you so surprised by The Pit? And why do you think it's the big winner? If we think about just the value that these shows bring to these streaming services, to the network, to your point, it has to be beyond just the critical acclaim that comes with the Emmys.

6:38And so I think if you look at a show like The Pit, whose episode is a budget of about$6 million, less than$6 million, it's a traditional almost NBC Thursday night style show. For legal reasons, it is not a follow up to ER. We are legally not allowed to call it an ER spinoff or a sequel series or anything associated with ER. But even though it is in our hearts. But if you look at the viewership progression of that show, it doesn't really pick up until its 10th week of eligibility on the Nielsen weekly top 10 list. And then it really continues to climb for a little bit. And actually, if we look at other data from a company called Luminate, which uses a similar metric to Nielsen.

7:15Oh, right. I put this in my newsletter once. It got a big spike after the nominations. Yes, it got a 200 % spike in the week after the nominations. Now, if you compare that, Matt, to The White Lotus or The Last of Us, they did not see similar spikes. They saw a continued decrease in viewership. Now, that does not say that the show is declining in interest or in value, but that people are watching those shows the minute they air. There is a built-in fan base. They're hits. They're not a discovery. Everybody knows what The White Lotus is at this point. They're watching it when it airs. It's a fun thing.

7:45You watch it every week and talk about it with your friends. But so for the pit to be able to do a similar style of cultural zeitgeist following it at a fraction of the cost that it would do for a traditional HBO, this is an HBO Max show, but a traditional HBO show, I think shows the possibility for other types of these styles of programs that can air or stream on a platform like HBO Max, air on a network like HBO, and still find that kind of critical acclaim that someone like Casey Blois, who heads up HBO, is really thinking about, while also making sure that the economics makes sense for the business they're running.

8:19Yeah, I don't think they greenlit this show as an awards player. It turned into something good, but this was a lower cost experiment. And honestly, that is why I think it's going to win Best Drama Series over Severance because I think people in the TV industry want shows like this to work. They see it as a model that is sustainable and it's old style broadcast network TV, basically with a prestige kind of gloss on it. I mean, ER won the Best Drama Series Emmy back in the day. And these kinds of shows should be allowed to exist and thrive and win awards. And I think that's why a lot of people are going to vote for it.

8:59The severance numbers are interesting. I mean, for a platform that is much smaller, Apple TV Plus, to get to 157.5 million viewing hours, pretty impressive for a show like that. There's no question that Severance had a breakout hit in its most recent season. I think, though, it also brought in, similar to The White Lotus, a ton of interest because of how popular that season was to add people catching up. What I think is actually much more interesting about Apple in this category, based on the charts that Nielsen sent us, is that Apple has two dramas that are sitting within it. They have Severance and they have Slow Horses, which brought in 49.4 million hours viewed.

9:38So congratulations to Gary Oldman and farting agents. So that's great. Yeah, but you know what? Slow Horses is like barely in English. You have to put subtitles on it, even though it's in English. So like, I'm not surprised that that show is less accessible than something like Severance, even though Slow Horses has more seasons. So you'd think that there'd be more to watch there in viewing hours. But Apple has two shows within this. Netflix only has one. Netflix has The Diplomat. And I think what's really fascinating about that observation is that if Netflix never appeared on the Nielsen top 10 charts, they would be like, well, sure.

10:13But Netflix dominates every single week when Nielsen puts out their charts, in part because of how Netflix drops its shows. When it drops a full season, there are more minutes to be viewed and therefore it helps within the way Nielsen uses its methodology. But to really only have the diplomat, which came in at 95 million hours viewed, I think that's something really interesting about Apple's current moment. Well, what do you mean? Just that they're making better shows or more appealing shows for awards voters or that they're getting people to watch them. Because the Diplomat being down on the list there, I'm surprised everyone assumes that every Netflix show is just an automatic juggernaut.

10:47Now, given these are just domestic numbers, Nielsen doesn't do the international component here. So maybe the Diplomat was huge overseas, but it's not as big as Paradise on Hulu, which is surprising to me. The thing that I keep coming back to is that Apple's always made the type of shows that would maybe appeal to Emmy voters. and so therefore would appeal to that kind of the nomination process. But I think now we are seeing that uptick in general viewership. So the question of how important are these shows from a value proposition to the platforms beyond just the Emmy noms, beyond just the fact that they might be able to throw that onto their marketing materials, I think Apple is beginning to really find an audience.

11:27You're seeing that too with the fact that they feel pretty comfortable with the price increases. You really only do that if you're pretty sure you can maintain a relatively similar churn rate to what you currently have. That's why Netflix tends to do it right before they've got big things coming out, as we all know. And so I do think Apple, between Severance and Slow Horses, is finding shows that resonate with people that are also resonating with Emmy voters. And we'll talk about the studio and their other stuff. Yes. The last one on the list is Andor, which is a fascinating experiment here. I mean, I finally watched the second season.

11:58It's really good. And it's kind of a miracle that this actually exists on Disney+. I mean, there is no way the current regime would allow this to happen these days. These episodes cost more than$20 million. The audience viewing hours here is$88 million over the period. Not a huge hit on Disney +, but they gave them carte blanche to do whatever they wanted here with a political thriller set in the Star Wars world that is insanely expensive, but made for a prestige audience. It's kind of amazing. What are your thoughts, Matt? I know we're not getting into the Emmy stuff in particular, but on that show receiving 14 nominations, but not one for Diego Luna.

12:40Oh, that sucks. But you know what? It is a reflection that people consider this show a technical Marvel and a storytelling Marvel and not necessarily an acting showcase. He's great on the show. I thought a lot of people were great on the show. But I also think it's dense. It's hard. You have to get through a couple episodes to really figure out what's going on. And in this day and age, it's hard to keep the attention of these voters through stuff like that. And they really tried hard. They did a good campaign this year, but it doesn't surprise me that they didn't get acting enough. He's also very stoic.

13:15He's a stoic character in the show. And I think he does a lot of looking more than talking sometimes, and maybe they ding him for that. Right, yeah. So, Julia, do you consider Andor the least efficient show in these lists? Oh, without question. The dreaded efficiency quotient on whether the cost is justified for the ratings. Andor, gigantic cost. And among these, it's only above slow horses, which costs a fraction of that. You know what I will say, though, about Andor? I think it had two things working for it. And one kind of gets back to a fear that Bob Iger had years ago. The first thing it had working for it was that it changed up its release schedule, the way that it was dropping episodes.

13:57Now, to your point, Matt, it's really hard to keep people's attention, whether they're Emmy voters, whether they're regular people. And so instead of doing a drop of three episodes to begin with and then weekly for a show as dense as Andor, they split those 12 episodes across three episode batches over four weeks. And I think that created enough of an incentive to keep watching over those four weeks. And although you may lose some of the audience giving up the weekly release, you actually create a much more tangible and enthralling story. I thought that was just a stunt for the Nielsen ratings, because if you put three episodes up at a time, the hardcore fans are going to watch them and it's going to burst into the Nielsen ratings rather than drawing it out over 12 weeks.

14:39I think we spent a lot of time looking at Nielsen ratings and week after week. I think people within these companies do. I don't think anyone else cares, especially people who are watching. No, no, no. The real world doesn't care. But I think the narrative around Andor was that it was a very expensive show that nobody watched. And the Nielsen ratings for season two did go up in these bursts. So they got to say that Andor is finding its audience while neglecting the fact that the long tail of that audience was not as long. But I also think that Andor had the advantage of doing what a Star Wars project should do, which is that there was a break in between these episodes, right?

15:19It wasn't year after year. It was the first season aired in 2022. People found it through word of mouth. And when the second season came back, and it was much, I would argue, much stronger, I think there was an even larger built-in fan base. And the way that they approached it as this thing to really be treated with care felt like something you would do with a Star Wars film, where you were waiting 15 years for a movie. And I think when we look at Bob Iger saying years ago, you know, we're putting out Star Wars movies too fast. When you're taking something as extraordinary as a Star Wars IP and turning it into something as ordinary as a streaming gimmick, you're going to lose part of the audience already, especially that built-in audience.

15:58This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach, and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that, bull spend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bull spend.

16:35Advertise on LinkedIn. the network that works for you. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a$250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash the town. That's linkedin.com slash the town. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Netflix, presenting Beef. Now nominated for 16 Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series. Esquire raves it's hands down the best TV show of the year. from Emmy-nominated creator, writer, and director Lee Sung-jin, starring Emmy-nominated lead actor Oscar Isaac, lead actress Carrie Mulligan, supporting actor Charles Melton, and supporting actress Yoon-ya Jung.

17:17IGN hails it a masterpiece. Lee Sung-jin's series remains an untouchable force. Beef, the most nominated limited series of the year. Let's move on to Outstanding Comedy Series. The number one most viewed show of the nominees, Abbott Elementary. Not a surprise. No. It airs on ABC and Hulu. It's got a ton of episodes. It's got 184.1 million viewing hours. The real shock to me is that it's only a little bit above Only Murders in the Building on Hulu. That's at 159.1 million hours and a little bit above The Bear on Hulu, 141.1. Those shows have a lot fewer episodes, and I wouldn't think they were as broadly appealing as Abbott Elementary, but apparently they are.

18:08Well, the other thing about all those shows that you mentioned too, which really stuck out for me from this chart that Nielsen sent us, was how much of it was Disney. Like Disney continues to dominate within the comedy section. Yeah, top three there. Whether it is the Emmy voters, whether it's the general audience. And so I think the fact that you have a show like Abbott Elementary that maybe doesn't do as high of a viewership as we were perhaps expecting because it's a much more broader audience. The fact that they can have these sizable audiences across both niche interests, I would say the bear kind of falls into that as a weird dramedy, right?

18:38We won't get into that whole situation. The fact that you can then have that with something as broad appealing as Abbott Elementary, I think goes to show where Disney's strength is right now in this moment. It's not necessarily in the dramas outside of Andor. It really is within this comedy category, and I think we're seeing that. Well, FX had Shogun last year. That was a pretty big hit, and it won the Emmy. Sure, but continuously, we're looking at The Bear, we're looking at Ole Merge in the building, we're looking at Abbott Elementary. Year after year, these shows kind of sit at the top of that list.

19:06Yeah, it's true. Nobody Wants This is also a Disney-produced show, but it airs on Netflix. And that's the number four show, 96.8 million. I think Disney probably regrets selling this one to Netflix, but they did. And next one is Shrinking on Apple TV+. Then we get into the bottom three, And it's interesting because the third least watched comedy series on this list is Hacks, which is the reigning champion. 56.5 million. Then it's What We Do in the Shadows, another Disney show on FX and Hulu. And then at the bottom is the studio. The favorite to win this year had only 16.9 million viewing hours.

19:50That is about one-eleventh the audience of Abbott Elementary. Everybody I know watched the studio. I'm sure everybody you know watched the studio. Not very many people in the real world watched the studio. That's not surprising, though. No, I guess not. I know. You're talking about a show that has one-tenth, one-eleventh, the size of a different show that has 20x the audience size. I know. And it's on broadcast TV. And the thing is, the Emmys have always done this. In the peak TV era, they go for the neat shows. I mean, the audience for girls back in the day was tiny. The audience for Mad Men was tiny, but they were shows that were designed for the industry.

20:33Succession never had a huge audience like a lot of these shows just don't. This is the first actual ratings number we've seen for the studio, right? Because it never charted and Apple doesn't reveal any numbers. So this 16.9 million viewing hours within the entire season, that's the first we've seen that number, right? It is. And when you talk about the value of the Emmys still, you know, the studio is one of those shows that saw about a 60 % increase in viewership the week after Emmy nominations. Oh, that's good. Right. So people are seeking it out. But to your point, when we're talking about Apple TV +, now this is a streaming service that I would argue most Emmy voters are going to have because it's a very LA, New York type streaming service in terms of the interest of those shows.

21:17But when we think about Apple TV +, we have to remember, it represents less than 1 % of total connected TV viewing time in the US. They don't even make the Nielsen Gage chart. It's kind of amazing. No, the numbers I see put it like routinely between half a percentage point and like 0.75. And so it's not due. And to compare, that's like ESPN plus is at like 0.3. That's mostly because they don't have very much content. They don't have a library. We've talked about that reason. Their originals, as we've seen from Severance and from some of the other shows, like the originals can end up on the chart.

21:49And Ted Lasso is still there a lot, even though it hasn't had new episodes in a couple of years. But the overall numbers for Apple TV are not good. And we'll see. Studio, I think, has the most to gain from a big platform on the Emmys because it does have Seth Rogen. It is a broad comedy if you get past some of the industry stuff. And it could get a bigger audience by getting this three-hour commercial on CBS for the show. Yeah. And also the studio from an economic standpoint related to the Emmys is going to be the type of big deal that Tim Cook and Eddie Q want for their platform. If it garners enough attention through all these Emmy wins, maybe everyone will thank Sal Silverstein or whatever his name is in the show.

22:33Sal Saperstein, please get it correct. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But if they have that moment, that could be the type of show that brings people into Apple TV Plus at a time again when their content slate is a little bit better than it was three, four years ago. Yes, I am told Tim Cook will be there on Sunday at the Emmys. He tends to go to these award shows when they have big contenders. He doesn't have another dinner with Donald Trump? No, he does not. And he's not busy hawking new iPhones, but he will be there. Maybe we'll have a repeat of the greatest moment in award show history, the Ricky Gervais joke about sweatshops in front of Tim Cook at the Golden Globes.

23:09I think about it every week. It's so good. I know. No, but he's there. I think he's there mostly for severance. He has a relationship with Ben Stiller. That is their premium prestige drama. They put a lot of their resources behind it. But I think studio has a better shot of winning than Severance does. So does this just go to prove that ratings have nothing to do with Emmy wins or nominations? If the studio might be, Julia, you can tell me, the least watched best comedy winner in Emmy history? Didn't Mrs. Maisel win a few years? Marvelous Mrs. Maisel had a small audience. Oh, Fleabag. No, Fleabag has got to be the least watched.

23:52Okay. When they won. So that is not something that has shifted. Did ratings matter more years ago than it does today? Yes, yes, yes. Frasier would win every year. Friends won once. The Office won. Seinfeld won once. It used to be the Emmys would honor more populist shows. Now, it used to be that there were only shows on the broadcast networks and a few cable networks, and that was the universe that they chose from. When there are 200, 300 shows to choose from, you're going to get more niche winners. But yes, the Emmys used to be more populous. But I would still argue that a big fat hit can help you at the Emmys, certainly with nominations.

24:35I mean, we saw like the Obi-Wan Kenobi show got a drama series nomination. And we've seen like the boys get in there and like these bigger shows that the Emmy voters tend to acknowledge because they're hits. Those do get in there and it does matter. So it's not like they're just looking for the most obscure shows ever. I could argue they actually matter even more, even if it's not necessarily reflected. My argument for this is that if you're losing monoculture, if the last monoculture is the NFL and Taylor Swift, then finding ways to bring in some form of audience that is feeling connected through something that they all participate in, as opposed to just leaning into everyone's various niche interests, serves the Academy much better than just saying, we love this one little thing.

25:18It does, but they also will vote for what they want. I mean, HBO, a lot of these HBO shows that nobody watches in the real world, they dominate the awards. And, you know, this was a big problem back in the day. Like the broadcast networks and cable networks were like, why are we doing an Emmys show on the broadcast networks? They rotate it when it's really just a three hour commercial for HBO. Like, why is Temple Grandin a movie that nobody watched on HBO? Why is it getting 45 minutes of broadcast airtime when Claire Danes and the real life subject are like having a love fest on stage? Nobody knows what these things are.