The 68th Primetime Emmy Awards will honor the best of American television Sunday, and networks have been inundating media and Television Academy members with pleas for their shows.
But with a legion of cable stations, streaming platforms and video on-demand services revolutionizing how Americans watch TV, analysts question whether the awards still have the cultural cachet they once boasted.
“It’s shocking just how irrelevant an Emmy win is when it comes to audiences deciding what shows to watch. People just don’t care about the award,” Jeetendr Sehdev, a celebrity branding expert at the University of Southern California, told AFP.
“The award has continued to lose its influence on TV viewers with less than one in 10 Americans being more inclined to watch a series because it has won an Emmy.”
Sehdev headed a two-year study ending last week that surveyed 2,000 Americans and found 87 percent believed the Emmys were less significant than the Oscars, while almost three-quarters said they were not “overly excited” by the Emmys show.
Last year, the awards drew their smallest audience on record, 11.9 million, according to data tracker Nielsen, a drop of almost four million on 2014 and the nadir of a quarter-century decline.
On top of dwindling ratings, it appears that TV networks are putting less faith than they used to in the power of an Emmys nomination to give them an immediate audience boost.
Of the 14 nominees for outstanding drama and outstanding comedy series this year, only three will be showing new episodes before Christmas, according to entertainment website IndieWire.
This is in marked contrast with just five years ago, when eight of the 12 nominated series returned within two weeks of the Emmys.
September has traditionally fired the starting gun on new seasons for TV’s biggest shows, but streaming services and cable TV are challenging the notion that there should even be an on and off season.
Netflix released “Stranger Things,” one of the most talked-about series of the year, a full two weeks after voting for Emmys nominations closed, and a new season isn’t expected until next year.

Source: Arab News