They had nowhere to go but up.
Sunday night’s Tonys telecast on CBS snared 7.2 million viewers — a 20 percent increase in viewers over last year’s all-time-low (6 million viewers).
It was also the telecast’s best viewership numbers in four years.
The show, hosted by CBS sitcom star Neil Patrick Harris (“How I Met Your Mother”), was also helped, in part, by several of the A-list nominees, most notably Tom Hanks (“Lucky Guy”), who surprisingly lost the Best Actor statuette to Tracy Letts (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”)
Sunday’s Tonys broadcast was up across-the-board in all the major demos, including households (21 percent), adults 25-54 (14 percent), and adults 18-49 (20 percent).
Harris, marking his fourth time hosting the Tonys, received mostly solid reviews for keeping the show moving along — and particularly for his grand entrance at the top of the show with Mike Tyson.