The poor SAG Awards never stood a chance. A pretaped and condensed-to-one-hour version of the 2021 Screen Actors Guild Awards settled for 957,000 total viewers across TNT and TBS, according to Nielsen, a new all-time low for the annual special.
Last year’s show had 2 million total viewers on the Turner cable channels. That was the previous record low, and was down from 2.7 million viewers in 2019.
Comparing 2020’s two-hour (8 p.m. to 10 p.m.) telecast to 2021’s one-hour (9 p.m. to 10 p.m.) telecast, the special dropped 52% in terms of its overall TV audience.
Sag, indeed.
Interestingly enough, the bigger hit came on the TNT end — that cable network was down 62% from the prior year.