And the award for television's lowest-rated Emmys in well over a decade goes to ...
The 60th Primetime Emmy Awards show, broadcast on Disney-owned (nyse: DIS - news - people ) ABC.
Garnering only a nine share in the advertiser-beloved 18-to-49-year-old demographic, the broadcast ranked the lowest in Nielsen's recorded People Meter history.
In total, the three-hour kudofest, emceed by reality hosts Ryan Seacrest, Heidi Klum, Jeff Probst, Howie Mandel and Tom Bergeron, scored only 12.2 million viewers. That's down from last year's paltry 13 million; it's also the smallest audience since at least 1992, according to early estimates from Nielsen Media Research.
Partly to blame: the little-watched programs the award show celebrated. On average, none of the winners in the ceremony's major categories--best actor, actress, comedy or drama--get more than 6 million viewers on a weekly basis.
AMC's Mad Men, a period piece set at a 1960s Madison Avenue ad agency, took TV's top honor, winning the prize for best drama series despite drawing less than 1 million viewers last season. (By comparison, News Corp.-owned (nyse: NWS - news - people ) Fox's American Idol handily pulls in some 28 million weekly.) The impressive feat marked the first top-series win by basic cable in the award show's 60-year history.
But if history is any indication, an Emmy win won't bring the critics' darling more viewers. Unlike an Oscar, which often offers a significant boost at the box office, an Emmy doesn't sweeten a show's ratings. In the five years prior to the writer's strike, viewership for Emmy-winning drama series declined 12% the following season.
What a statuette does do is add buzz and bragging rights to a show and its host network; it also serves as a differentiator at the checkout aisle.
That's hopeful news for Mad Men and the night's other ratings-challenged winners, including Glenn Close of FX's Damages, Bryan Cranston of AMC's Breaking Bad and Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin of General Electric-
