It seems ABC can't win for losing.

On a night when only one of its prime-time series won an award (James Spader for "The Practice"), the network played host to the lowest-rated Emmy Awards since 1990.

According to fast national ratings, an average of 14 million viewers watched the three-hour-plus telecast, hosted by Garry Shandling. That's off nearly 4 million viewers from the 17.9 million who watched last year's Emmys, which aired on FOX. ABC probably won't even end up winning the night -- that honor goes to CBS, which rode a late-ending NFL game into primetime to capture the overall ratings win (final national numbers will be released Tuesday).

The slide in total viewers was mirrored in the ratings for adults 18-49, the group ad buyers and networks target most heavily. The Emmys drew a 4.7 rating in the demographic, compared to a 7.0 last year.

The last time an Emmy telecast was watched by fewer people was Sept. 16, 1990, when about 12.3 million people watched "L.A. Law" and "Murphy Brown" take the awards for best drama and comedy series. The awards aired on FOX that year. Even the 2001 awards, delayed by the Sept. 11 attacks and airing opposite Game 7 of the World Series, managed 17 million viewers.

It's hard to pinpoint why the show's ratings dipped so precipitously. The other broadcast networks followed the tradition of airing reruns or movies opposite the awards, so competition wasn't that stiff. It may have something to do the fact that the night's big winners were shows not a great number of people watch.

"The Sopranos," which won for best drama series, typically draws a huge-for-cable audience of about 10 million viewers a week to HBO. Still, only about 40 million of the country's 109 million TV households subscribe to HBO. The network's miniseries "Angels in America," the night's biggest winner, and best comedy winner "Arrested Development," weren't exactly ratings smashes either. "Angels" drew fewer than 5 million viewers last December, while "Arrested" struggled to find an audience in its debut season, averaging 6.2 million viewers.

ABC's positive spin on the Emmys notes that aside from sports and the Oscars, the awards drew the network's biggest Sunday audience in 19 months, and that about 30 million people watched at least part of the broadcast -- and, presumably, some of the many promos for ABC's new series rolling out this week.