CMA Awards Burning Questions: How ‘Country’s Biggest Night’ Became the First Big Pandemic-Era Awards Show to Test Positive for a Live Audience

variety.com:

Chris Willman Music WriterFor the last nine months, television awards shows have been busy trying to inventing wheels when it comes to novel ways of presenting a telecast without reaction shots.

That’s why Wednesday night’s CMA Awards felt like the novelty of the year so far in the awards space, just by virtue of having something resembling a traditional live audience.

It wasn’t the usual arena crowd: The 15,000 or so people who would usually be packed into Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena for the show were replaced by fewer than 100 people, all of them performers or presenters on the show and their guests.

But it did feel, on the surface, like a return to kudo-cast normalcy — even if the offstage drama that transpired, with five performers.