Moving this year’s Primetime Emmy Awards up a month and switching the telecast to a weekday evening predictably caused NBC to lose some of their audience, but the network has proudly stated that last night’s Emmys still drew the second-highest viewership in the past eight years. Despite airing on a Monday for the first time in nearly 40 years, Nielsen ratings reveal that 15.6 million viewers tuned into the broadcast, which saw AMC’s drug drama Breaking Bad and ABC’s hit Modern Family take home top awards.

Last year’s show, which took place on a Sunday in September, drew 17.6 million viewers. However, NBC is still considering this year’s 66th Primetime Emmy Awards a success, as the ceremony brought in 5.3 million viewers in the coveted 18-to-49 demographic and was a top trending topic on social media throughout its telecast. NBC announced Tuesday that the Emmys helped them easily take down CBS, FOX, and ABC during the 8 p.m.-to-11 p.m. time period, as the combined total of those rival broadcast networks was only 13.8 million viewers on Monday. Last night was also NBC’s highest-rated Monday overnight rating since the network’s 2007 telecast of the Golden Globes.

The 66th Primetime Emmys, which New York Times writer Alessandra Stanley said “was a brisk, rather tame event,” included a memorable kiss between Veep winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Bryan Cranston, an amusing audience question-and-answer session with Melissa McCarthy, and a touching tribute to the late Robin Williams by Billy Crystal.

Notably snubbed at the ceremony were True Detective, Orange Is the New Black, Fargo and the critically-acclaimed HBO film The Normal Heart. Hollywood Reporter writer Tim Goodman said that the “head-scratching awards show” delivered winners “all over the map.”

“The Emmys this year were inconsistent and weird, though certainly not all bad — just jarring at times,” concluded Goodman.