Grammy Awards Tank Badly, On Pace for All-Time Low

What happens when a music awards show depicts police brutality and racism, celebrates "WAP," and picks someone as unfunny as Trevor Noah to lead the show? An all-time record low, that's what.

The viewership for the 2021 Grammys is so bad, only The Daily Show With Trevor Noah can relate. According to Nielsen’s earliest-available data, the awards show drew just 7.9 million, putting it on pace for a damning low.

The adjusted numbers will tick up, but the final viewership average will remain awful. To put these numbers into context, last year's show drew 16.54 million viewers. One year later, the show is as dead as a Lakers-Heat NBA Finals matchup.

As for the demo-bros -- "What about the demo? That's all that matters" -- the 2020 Grammys set a record at 5.4. The 2021 Grammys plummeted to 1.9. Also dead.

While almost every event, show, and game dipped over the past 12 months, the "America is awful" lectures have almost exclusively tanked the NBA Finals, Golden Globes, ESPYs, ESPN Radio, Jimmy Fallon, and now the Grammys to levels never seen before.

Trevor Noah deserves much of the blame here. There couldn't have been a worse choice for host. Hint to CBS: if a guy kills The Daily Show, don't hire him to do other things. Americans who consume South Park get the drift. Noah is promoted during its commercials with about two ads per show, two times more than needed.

At this year's Grammys, Lil Baby also showed a skit depicting a white cop shooting a black man dead. To many, music is their only escape. Aggressively blending another form of art with social issues is a turn-off to, according to the numbers, over half of the routine Grammy viewers.

I'm not sure if "WAP" helped or hurt the viewership, yet I just want to point out that NPR named it the "song of the year" because women "honoring their own ladyparts drew the ire of the insecure zealots." What does that have to do with music? NPR didn't get into that.

Anyway, at least Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion didn't portray any Dr. Seuss characters:

No one watched the Grammys in 2021.