Michelle Obama kicked things off last night at the 61st Grammy Awards after some “Havana” sizzle, then Lady Gaga continued her Taylor Swift-shocked victory look tour and Ariana Grande won but very clearly wasn’t in the house.
Additionally, during the nearly four-hour CBS show, Drake showed up in a rare award-show appearance but got cut off, K-Pop superstars BTS made some history, Jennifer Lopez took center stage for a Motown tribute with Smokey Robinson, and Diana Ross slayed, as she supremely does.
Back in Los Angeles after last year’s stint in New York City, this year’s Alicia Keys-hosted ceremony also saw a Dolly Parton tribute plus a Prince-tinged and seemingly Klaus Nomi-inspired showstopper by Janelle Monáe. Back on in February after last year’s January airing, last night’s Grammys handed out some hardware too.
There were some big wins by Cardi B, A Star Is Born Gaga, Kasey Musgraves and Childish Gambino aka Atlanta creator Donald Glover too, plus that ’70s rocker-in-chief Jimmy Carter snagged his third Grammy and Spotify got mentioned a lot.
However, when it comes to the ratings, the song pretty much stayed the same. Last night’s primetime show snagged a 12.8/22 in metered market ratings.
Facing the competition of the midseason return of The Walking Dead on cable, the 2019 Grammys bucked the recent awards-show ratings trend to increase a tiny bit from last year’s James Corden-hosted bash. (By “a tiny bit,” I mean less than 1% in the metered markets over the 60th annual Grammy Awards, but up is up – at least for now, in the early metrics.)
The January 28, 2018 show, which saw a cameo by Hillary Clinton and more than its fair share of Donald Trump cage-rattling, went on to score a 5.9/21 rating among adults 18-49 and 19.81 million viewers, that metric the worst that the CBS-aired show had seen since 2009, when the telecast snared an audience of 19.04 million viewers. Though they didn’t go head to head with a returning TWD, the 2018 Grammys were also the lowest rated ever among the valued 18-49 demographic.
We’ll update with more numbers from the Kacey Musgraves- and Childish Gambino-led Grammys plus the rest of the Big 4 night later on. A night that saw Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them making its network debut on NBC, I might counter-programmingly add.
And yes, the mentioned country singer and the multi-medium Glover were the top winners of the night with four Grammys each.
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