The 78th Annual Tony Awards delivered its largest broadcast audience in six years on Sunday night.
The 2025 ceremony, hosted by Cynthia Erivo, boasted 4.85M viewers on CBS, per live + same-day Nielsen data. That’s up 38% over last year’s audience of 3.53M.
At just over three hours long, the telecast also drew the largest streaming audience ever for Paramount+, parent company Paramount Global touted Monday afternoon. Apparently, viewership on the streamer was up 208% year-over-year, though actual numbers were not disclosed.
This is a strong performance for the Tony Awards, especially after a tough few years for the ceremony celebrating American theater. Last year’s telecast not only fell on Father’s Day, it also battled one of the lowest Sunday primetime viewing windows on record, per Nielsen, which helps explain the fairly low audience turnout but likely didn’t lessen the sting.
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That came after the Tonys were seemingly bouncing back in 2023, when just over 4M viewers tuned in for the second consecutive year. As with most major award shows, the Tonys were heavily impacted by the pandemic and viewership plummeted to just 2.6M viewers for its hybrid 2021 telecast.
Still, the Tonys haven’t managed to reach pre-pandemic audience levels quite yet. In 2019, the telecast drew 5.4M viewers, indicating they were already on a bit of a downward trend after failing to reach the 6.3M that tuned in for the 2018 show.
Maybe Happy Ending won Best Musical and five other trophies Sunday to lead the 78th annual Tony Awards, and Purpose was named Best Play at Radio City Music Hall in New York. The night also featured performances from host Cynthia Erivo, the original Broadway cast of Hamilton and more. See the full winners list here.