We know not how many people tuned in last night to watch The Sopranos have a lovely dinner out…but The 61st Annual Tony Awards telecast did a little better than 200-300 viewers. They had 6.24 million of 'em, down a bit from the previous year's 7.79 million and even a bit below the 2005 show, which was seen by 6.5 million. Given how no particular play or musical this year created much buzz out there, I'm guessing some are surprised/relieved that the totals weren't a lot lower.
It's interesting how the dynamic has changed. Not so long ago, each year's Tonyfest was surrounded by press speculations and rumors that CBS would dump what was then a two-hour annual broadcast. Some even voiced the view that the whole show was so cramped in two hours that it should up and move over to PBS, and there were those compromise years when the first hour of it was on PBS, and then the "real show" was the two hours on CBS. At some point, perhaps because overall network shares had fallen and the Tony numbers didn't seem quite as bad, CBS decided to just take the whole thing at three hours as an open-ended commitment…and since then, there's been no talk of the Tonys being moved to The Weather Channel or anything of the sort. But really, the ratings haven't substantially improved. It's the sets that got smaller.
Once upon a time in comic books, a good-selling comic sold over 200,000 copies. A book I wrote was once considered an embarrassing flop for All Concerned because it came in around 170,000. Then came a day when anything over 100,000 was great…and now, if you can move 20,000 copies of a comic, some publishers turn cartwheels. Same with TV. I did shows that were considered disasters because they were "only" watched by an audience that today would put you near the top of the Top Ten.
Moral of the story? If you have a failure and you can wait long enough, eventually expectations will catch up with you. Or down with you, I suppose.