It’s a tale as old as time: Bigger isn’t necessarily better. After two years of graceful, measured, and intimate pandemic-era awards shows in Nashville, the Academy of Country Music Awards returned to their usual home of Las Vegas and doubled down on the huge, choosing the cavernous Allegiant Stadium to stage country music’s first streaming-only awards show on Prime Video.
Unfortunately, the result was a show that both looked and felt empty.
Longtime viewers of the ACM Awards might recall that for the milestone 50th anniversary in 2015, the ACMs eschewed their longtime home of the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Vegas for the massive AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The show was still airing on CBS then and the sound on TV was strangely small and echoey, with few of the winners knowing exactly where to look when handed their awards. Monday night at Allegiant Stadium, the sound on Prime Video was strangely small and echoey, and winners still didn’t know where to look. But this time, there were no commercials.
Initially, the idea of a tight, compact ACM Awards uninterrupted by commercial breaks sounded like a good thing: Two hours to be duly entertained before turning in at a reasonable hour on a school night. Plus, the reliably great Dolly Parton was hosting, alongside a couple of hot young stars in Jimmie Allen and Gabby Barrett.
But the pacing was frenetic. When the production wasn’t rushing from one segment to the next, it was teeing up a synergistic preview of some upcoming Prime Video show starring Chris Pratt in order to give stagehands a chance to reset one of the stadium’s three stages.
Yet the performances often came across as clipped. For the entire first 15 minutes of actual music, it seemed as if no one sang a complete song. Co-hosts Allen and Barrett steamrolled through two numbers with Vegas in their titles (“Viva Las Vegas,” “Let’s Go to Vegas”), Walker Hayes shoe-horned “AA” in before his viral hit “Fancy Like,” and