Globes fumble against playoffs

The Oakland-Tennessee playoff game ensured that the Golden Globes didn’t gleam quite as brightly, with an estimated 20 million people watching the three-hour telecast Sunday, a drop of about 15% over last year. That’s the show’s smallest audience since 1997.

Those numbers were still pretty respectable for NBC, given that the AFC championship game overlapped most of the awards on the East Coast, the most populous time zone.

In Los Angeles, where the Globes aired on a delayed basis and didn’t compete with football, the telecast fared significantly better, attracting more than 18% of homes in the viewing area, or roughly 980,000 households.

The Raiders, meanwhile, still have their share of Southern California fans, with more than 1.3 million homes -- or just about a quarter of those in the L.A.-Orange County market -- viewing the game on KCBS-TV. Final national ratings will be issued today.

Brian Lowry