The "In Memoriam" segment is an awards-show staple. Every year, we're provided a montage of those who died in the previous year; last night's Emmy Awards, though, provided a handful of dead luminaries their own, separate mini-eulogies. Of those who weren't given that honor, which one got the most appreciation from the audience? We decided to find out.
We took the isolated audience microphone feed from the "In Memoriam" segment and measured which TV personalities peaked the audio meter, as well as which ones sustained applause the longest. The winner, in both volume and length of applause, won't surprise you.
That Klugman—best known as sportswriter Oscar Madison from The Odd Couple—didn't get his own mini-eulogy is its own little scandal, but it doesn't take much technology to glance at the audio waveform and see a big bulge corresponding to Klugman's moment in the montage (the GIF up top also corresponds to Klugman). The only moment that drew more applause is when the segment ended. But another individual earned nearly as much acknowledgement, if for a shorter period of time:
Julie Harris won three Emmy awards and was nominated numerous more times, so it's not surprising she came in a close second.
Roger Ebert, too, was popular with Emmy attendees.
Who got the least applause?
This may seem shocking, but David Frost opened the death montage and thus likely caught the audience by surprise, or confusion whether they were expected to applaud or not—because almost nobody did. We're calling that an anomaly. Here's who got the least applause after Frost's appearance:
Oh screw you all, Emmy Award spectators. Steve Sabol was awesome.
Caveat: This is all highly unscientific. In addition to an audio tech most likely riding the levels of these audio channels, the very nature of Dolby Digital technology that delivers audio to your television set includes something called "Dynamic Range Compression," which means the "raw" audio worked with here is subject to an gain-modifying algorithm. Still, it's fun to look at, and any modifications to the volume of the audio didn't impact the length of it, in which by any measure Jack Klugman comes out on top.
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