Professional tip for Display Actors Guild Awards viewers: Watch it reside. That’s as a result of even these Netflix subscribers on the cheaper promoting tier will nonetheless get a commercial-free expertise when the telecast runs reside on Saturday at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET. After that preliminary livestream, nonetheless, industrial breaks might be inserted into replays for customers on the advert tier trying to timeshift and watch the SAG Awards later.
It’s a landmark 12 months for the SAG Awards, for a lot of causes. First off, it’s the thirtieth anniversary of the occasion, which returns to the Shrine Auditorium & Expo Corridor — the place the kudocast has spent most of its three-decade existence — after two years away. (Final 12 months, it was on the Fairmont Century Plaza Resort, and in 2022 it happened at Santa Monica’s Barker Hangar.)
Additionally, it’s the primary SAG Awards following final 12 months’s SAG-AFTRA strike and eventual new settlement with the AMPTP. And there’s a brand new manufacturing staff behind this 12 months’s SAG Awards: Baz Halpin, Mark Bracco and Linda Gierahn of Silent Home Prods. are becoming a member of SAG-AFTRA’s Jon Brockett as exec producers.
However maybe most strikingly, this reps the primary official 12 months for the SAG Awards to stream on Netflix. (Final 12 months, because of the last-minute licensing deal between SAG-AFTRA and Netflix, it solely ran on Netflix’s YouTube web page.) Underneath the multi-year pact with Netflix, which the L.A. Occasions reviews was price simply $7 million, the SAG Awards turns into the most recent main occasion to maneuver from linear to streaming.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNets — the arm previously generally known as Turner — parted methods with the SAG Awards in 2022, after 25 years. TNT had run the SAG Awards since 1998, after which TBS made it a simulcast in 2007. (NBC aired the primary three years of the SAG Awards, which launched in 1995.)
The ultimate SAG Awards on the TNets averaged 1.8 million complete viewers in 2022. It’s troublesome to say how many individuals watched the present final 12 months: Though the quantity reported was 1.5 million views, that’s not an apples-to-apples comparability to the standard Nielsen common quantity.
And we could by no means know the way many individuals tune in reside to the SAG Awards this Saturday on Netflix — that’s the sort of quantity the streamer won’t ever share. (The one reside streaming occasion with Nielsen complete viewer figures stays Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night time Soccer.) If the telecast pops up on Nielsen’s or Netflix’s rankers, we’ll get some thought of the way it carried out, however that’s nonetheless a unique sort of quantity than how viewership was reported when the SAG Awards ran on the TNets.
This 12 months’s SAG Awards will as soon as once more run for 2 hours, and the commercial-free format follows final 12 months’s run on Netflix’s YouTube web page, which was additionally with out advertisements.
“We’ve been brainstorming numerous actually nice concepts for some artistic components and interstitials that type of take us away from the primary stage at totally different instances,” Bracco not too long ago instructed Selection. Brockett added that as a result of there’s no arduous and quick time restrict on the streamer, acceptance speeches can go lengthy: “We sort of give them a basic time [limit] forward of time, but when we actually really feel like a speech is partaking and compelling, then we’ll let it go on so long as it must.”
The SAG Awards will proceed to be accessible on Netflix for replays up till 28 days after the occasion, when contractually it have to be faraway from the streamer. In the meantime, after the reside “Love is Blind” debacle, Netflix insiders imagine they’ve ironed out their livestream points. Since then, Netflix has pulled off “Chris Rock: Selective Outrage” (March 4, 2023), “Love Is Blind: Brazil Season 3 The Reside Reunion” (July 2, 2023) and “The Netflix Cup” (November 14, 2023) with out a difficulty. Subsequent up, the streamer has “The Netflix Slam” reside occasion on March 3.
Idris Elba is about to open this 12 months’s kudocast, which can embody Jennifer Aniston presenting Barbra Streisand with the 59th SAG Life Achievement Award. Presenters embody Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt coming collectively on stage for a “The Satan Wears Prada” reunion.
Different presenters embody Erika Alexander (“American Fiction”), Danielle Brooks (“The Colour Purple”), Sterling Okay. Brown (“American Fiction”), Michael Cera (“Barbie”), Jessica Chastain (“Moms’ Intuition”), Colman Domingo (“Rustin,” “The Colour Purple”), Robert Downey Jr. (“Oppenheimer”), SAG-AFTRA prexy Fran Drescher, Phil Dunster (“Ted Lasso”), Billie Eilish (“Swarm”), America Ferrera (“Barbie”), Brendan Fraser (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Taraji P. Henson (“The Colour Purple”), Troy Kotsur (“CODA”), Greta Lee (“Previous Lives,” “The Morning Present”), Melissa McCarthy (“Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story”), Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”), Glen Powell (“Hit Man”), Issa Rae (“American Fiction,” “Barbie”), Storm Reid (“Euphoria”), Margot Robbie (“Barbie”), Tracee Ellis Ross (“American Fiction”), Alexander Skarsgård (“Succession”), Omar Sy (“Lupin”), Hannah Waddingham (“Ted Lasso”), Naomi Watts (“Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”), and Jeffrey Wright (“American Fiction”).
In the meantime, the thirtieth Annual Display Actors Guild Awards Official Pre-Present, hosted by Tan France and Elaine Welteroth, will stream on Netflix and Netflix’s TikTok and YouTube channels at 7 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. PT on Saturday.
