Dim Afterglow: Golden Globes Roundup

NBC's hourlong broadcast of the 65th Annual Golden Globe Awards with video clips of nominees in each category drew a meager 5.8 million viewers, Nielsen Media Research reported on Monday.

That is a little more than one-quarter last year's U.S. television audience for the Globes -- 20 million viewers -- and even fewer than the 6 million who tuned in for CBS' pretaped presentation of the less prestigious People's Choice Awards last week.

As a result of lower viewership, NBC lost $10 million to $15 million in advertising revenue compared to what it had planned for the Globes telecast, according to one source familiar with advertising rates for the event.

NBC's no-frills, one-hour presentation of the winners Sunday night drew a 4.8 rating and 7 share, according to preliminary estimates from the nation's 55 largest metered markets by Nielsen Media Research. [...]

Last year, the Golden Globes ceremony on NBC had a 16.0 rating and 23 audience share, Nielsen said. A ratings point represents 1,128,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 112.8 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

Nielsen didn't immediately have an estimate of how many people actually watched the show on NBC or on other networks that carried the announcement of the winners.

Unlike the months-long writers strike itself, Hollywood's first big awards show was over in a flash, with no key winners, no stars in sight and no real fun for show biz fans.

The Writers Guild of America strike has decimated prime-time television and even forced some late-night talk show hosts to come up with their own jokes. But never in its 10-week duration has the labor dispute yielded as bizarre -- and, in a way, as symbolic -- an event as Sunday night's Golden Globes.

What is typically a glitzy and jokey awards dinner populated by Hollywood's top performers and executives was transformed by the strike into a cheerless news conference playing to a largely empty ballroom at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

All in all, the preshow special looked hastily put together and awkward — an apt preview of the tensions that poisoned the no-frills announcement event. NBC, which had bought the rights to the Golden Globes, wanted to recoup some of its losses with exclusive coverage of the substitute event, a news conference. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association instead opened the news conference at the Beverly Hilton to all the media.

And that led to a bizarre showdown: while E! and the TV Guide Network showed the announcements being read out in the hotel ballroom, NBC snubbed the event and jury-rigged its own version, using Nancy O’Dell and Billy Bush, the anchors of the NBC Universal show “Access Hollywood,” to announce the winners on a different gold-colored stage, with different film clips. NBC chose its own timing to announce the winners, and was mostly slower, so that viewers watching E! learned that Marion Cotillard won the award for best actress in a musical or comedy for “La Vie en Rose” long before NBC announced it.

It was a weird night, and NBC didn’t manage to make the best of it.

The Globes typically kick off Hollywood's award season with more than 1,000 stars and power brokers on hand for a rollicking ceremony. But they were knocked back into humdrum reality by the Hollywood writers strike, forced to trade that tradition for an awkward news conference with all the drama of a Los Angeles weathercast.

The hotel ballroom, which should have been filled with famous nominees cheek-to-cheek at cozy tables, instead was given over to risers holding TV cameras and an audience of reporters and anonymous others. The after-Globe parties that were to have drawn 3,000 merrymakers were canceled.

Scattered applause and cheers greeted the names of winners, but they came disembodied, from an audience that never made it on camera. The scaled-down event was attended by about 600 reporters, television crews, HFPA members, their invited guests and publicists in business attire.