Nearly 40 million people tuned in to Sunday’s Grammy Awards to watch the music industry lay its heart at the feet of its fallen heroine, Whitney Houston, while musicians plugged their new singles, LL Cool J prayed, Nicki Minaj was exorcised and cameras caught it all.
For the recording academy’s trophy show, that’s its second-largest crowd on record and its biggest audience in nearly three decades.
It’s also about 2 million more people than watched last year’s Academy Awards — the Oscars traditionally being the most-watched trophy show every year, by a healthy margin.
Sunday’s Grammycast, in fact, bagged a larger audience than four of the past six Oscarcasts. Which, frankly, is about time — what with the performance-packed Grammy show being so much better as TV than the acceptance speech-laden Oscars. Yes, we’d rather listen to even the last vestiges of the Beach Boys’ voices than another Martin Scorsese acceptance speech.
Houston, 48, was found Saturday afternoon, unconscious and underwater in the bathtub of her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel, where she was getting ready to attend a pre-Grammy party downstairs thrown annually by Clive Davis, the record-industry mogul who helped launch her career. Attempts to resuscitate her were unsuccessful, and she was declared dead.
Producers and CBS worked feverishly to include in the awards show some moments about Houston — one of the industry’s most successful pop singers.
Because if there’s one thing TV networks have tried to impress upon American viewers over the years, it’s that when a pop star dies suddenly on the eve of a big trophy show — even a faded pop star better known in recent years for her TV-newsmag interviews about drug addiction and erratic behavior — those viewers can expect to see celebs turn out to weep in the aisles, with neon lights around their hearts.
The effort paid off: According to early Nielsen stats, the Grammy broadcast, which started at 8 p.m. ET and ended about 11:30 p.m., peaked at 9:30 p.m. with more than 43 million watching.
And those viewers were not disappointed.
“We’ve had a death in our family,” LL Cool J — Grammycast host and star of the CBS crime drama “NCIS: Los Angeles” — emoted after Bruce Springsteen opened the show with a performance of his new single, “We Take Care of Our Own” (which started, a little unfortunately, with his shout-out, “America, are you alive out there?”).
“And so at least for me, for me, the only thing that feels right is to begin with a prayer for a woman we loved — for our fallen sister, Whitney Houston,” J continued.
Celebs in downtown Los Angeles’ Staples Center — including Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Blake Shelton and Taylor Swift — were seen with heads bowed as J thanked “our heavenly Father . . . for sharing our sister Whitney with us.”
Then he introduced a clip of Houston singing at a Grammy show years ago. The crowd got up on its feet and roared its approval of the doomed singer’s performance.
“Whitney — we will always love you,” J said.
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