BET Hits Pause on Soul Train and Hip Hop Awards, But the Culture Can’t
We talk about “protecting Black spaces” as if it’s a defensive act. But protection without investment is just preservation of an empty room.
I remember how the Soul Train line felt in a living room—uncles loosened up, aunties went elastic, teenagers dared each other to be extra. Awards night did that: it turned the television into a communal mirror. So when BET put the Soul Train Awards and the Hip Hop Awards on ice—“suspended” on linear TV while they figure out “where those award shows might best live” in a different media climate—I didn’t just read a corporate note. I felt the door to a room closing behind me.
It’s tempting to call this a protection move. Save the brands now, rehome them later. But protection without celebration is just museum glass. If we want to “protect” Black spaces, we can’t keep shrinking them, sanding down their edges, or moving them to odd hours and smaller boxes. At some point, the defensive crouch becomes the posture. You see it in the way organizers have eased off the gas, and you see it in the way viewers have drifted.
Look at the breadcrumbs. Soul Train skipped 2024 entirely after staging a 2023 “house party” in a private backyard—novel on paper, small on screen, and thin on winners in the room. That pivot made for pleasant television and clever copy, but it also read like triage disguised as innovation. The Hip Hop Awards pulled into Drai’s in Las Vegas last fall—an iconic club, a certain kind of energy—but a club footprint also compresses the ritual. You felt the show straining to be both a broadcast event and a bottle-service set. It was pre-taped on October 8 and aired on October 15, with Fat Joe hosting and Travis Scott getting the I Am Hip Hop honor. What a rough night. You would think it’ll be halfway decent, right? But “reimagining the traditional award show format” can’t just mean downsizing and calling it a vibe. If the choice is between an arena that thunders and a room that hums, you risk training the audience to accept the hum.
And then, the suspension. BET’s Scott Mills insists the awards “aren’t gone,” just migrating to wherever they might “best live.” That’s a fair corporate instinct in 2025, as BET weathers layoffs, its parent slashes 3.5% of U.S. staff, and the Paramount–Skydance deal locks in a new regime. But the cost of all that maneuvering is felt not just in headcount, but in confidence. Black music’s most reliable televised rituals now live in a TBD that’s only as reassuring as the people empowered to fill it. “Viewers aren’t tuning in” gets thrown around like a verdict. Sometimes it’s a scheduling error. This year’s BET Awards aired on a Monday in early June—outside the show’s usual late-June Sunday home—and paid for it: the 18–49 rating landed around 0.36, roughly half of 2024’s 0.7. Mills has already said they’ll move it back next year. When you violate the ritual, the ritual doesn’t return the favor.
Zoom out and awards television is messy, not doomed. The Tonys just drew their biggest audience in six years and spiked in every demo; the Oscars ticked down this spring after three straight gains, and the Emmys hit a record low last year in a strike-shifted January slot. Different shows, different weather patterns. The lesson isn’t that ceremonies are over—it’s that they still respond to craft, logistics, and care. When you build a night that feels necessary, people find it. That’s the tension I keep circling: we want to protect these Black spaces, but protection has become a loop—budget friction, brand-safe formatting, smaller rooms, until celebration is an afterthought. The result isn’t JUST lower ratings. IT’S LOWER STAKES. Without stakes, an awards show becomes compilation TV, a playlist with applause.
Celebration requires risk. You have to carve space for the unpredictable. You need stages that are wide enough for a big band, not just a DJ riser and a logo wall. You need time to breathe, which means not packing the run of show with sponsor beats that collapse everything into the same 90-second onramp. It also requires a bolder editorial spine. If the shows flatten all of that into a consensus gloss, the audience feels politely hosted rather than powerfully addressed. That’s when the second screen wins. Soul Train, at its best, was a syllabus in motion. It stretched the camera to hold a room, and then stretched the room to hold a scene. Even when the budget wasn’t lush, the frame was generous. The late-‘80s and ‘90s broadcasts let choreography and arrangement do the heavy lifting. When the Soul Train Awards returned under BET, those instincts occasionally resurfaced—the “Soul Cypher,” the deliberate lineage pairings—but they needed a bigger container and a clearer mission. By 2023, the “house party” conceit sold warmth and proximity while quietly shrinking the canvas.
Hip-hop’s televised ritual took a different path. The early BET cyphers mattered because they were appointment moments. Bars spilled into the next morning. The formula’s still there, but the urgency has thinned, less because of talent than because of context. A freestyle recorded weeks before airing, in a space that reads like a sponsored set, is a different voltage than a live gauntlet with an audience breathing down your neck. The 2024 move to Drai’s carried club energy but muted televisual scale; a choice like that tells viewers what to expect next year.
Meanwhile, the money side is louder than ever. BET’s layoffs in June, rolled into Paramount’s latest workforce cut, telegraph what everyone knows: linear TV is constricting, and bosses are trying to resize the furniture before the floor gives. After the Skydance deal closed this week, there’s a new corporate brain making decisions about what counts as “core.” In that room, award shows appear to involve spending nights with high costs and uncertain ad yields. I get it. But that calculus doesn’t account for why these nights exist. They aren’t just line items. They’re narrative control. They’re a chance to write, on-camera, what we think Black music is right now. You can’t outsource that to the algorithms.
So what does “going hard” look like in practice, without pretending budgets are infinite?
First, fix the date and let the audience build the ritual around it. Mills says the BET Awards will go back to the late-June Sunday slot in 2026, and that the festival returns. Good. Lock that in; stop training viewers to chase the show across the calendar. Small programming choices read as a large respect. Second, right-size the room upward. I’m not asking for arenas every time, but the stage has to feel consequential. If a club is the right creative call, scale the production so that television depth isn’t sacrificed. Build sightlines that tell viewers this is big, even if the footprint isn’t. The audience will forgive lean; it won’t forgive slight. Third, take the live risk. Broadcast the parts that could break. When the Tonys spike, it’s because the room feels like a room: ensembles ripping through numbers in the moment, stakes and sweat visible. Hip-hop and R&B deserve the same share of hazard. Put the cypher back in a live pocket. Let an elder curate a segment with no cutaway for the algorithm. You can do that controlled-chaos programming and still keep sponsors happy. It just takes conviction.
Fourth, and this matters, deepen the bench of who gets to build the show. If these nights flatten because the same five decision-makers replicate the same safe choices, rotate the keys. Bring in music directors with tour experience, not just TV credits, because the other option is to keep protecting the brand marks until they mean very little. We’ll guard the names, Soul Train and Hip Hop Awards, while starving the thing they once guaranteed: a night that enlarged the room for Black music on its own terms. That’s how you lose a ritual. It’s not that people stop caring. It’s that the show starts behaving like it doesn’t.
I don’t think the audience is gone. Some have aged out of appointment television; some built their own rituals on social; some simply haven’t been given a reason to plan a night around a broadcast that keeps moving the goalposts. But I see how quickly they return when the work compels. This spring, Broadway made a case for itself and got rewarded. The Oscars dipped but still gathered eighteen million people off the strength of a coherent, well-paced night. These aren’t miracles; they’re confirmations. Build something that feels live, feels important, feels like it might break, and folks show up.
BET says the suspended shows “aren’t gone.” I want to believe that. I want the Soul Train Awards to come back not as a smaller version of the thing, but as a bigger argument for R&B’s complexity, a place where arrangements breathe and the camera doesn’t flinch. I want the Hip Hop Awards to feel like the culture’s own State of the Union—messy, loud, musical, reverent enough to honor lineage and irreverent enough to break a template on purpose. However, the stars we have today perform with backtracks and barely have stage presence to save their life.
If that’s where this is headed—off linear, onto streaming, rebuilt from scratch—then say it plainly and program with ambition, not apology. Make the broadcast the capstone to something people can touch. The budget line doesn’t have to balloon, but the intent does. And if the future is a single tentpole on linear with everything else migrating, then that one tentpole has to carry the promise for the rest: no wobble on dates, no half-measures on staging, no compromising the sound so the LED wall can scream. It has to feel like the room again—the room where uncles loosen up, where aunties get elastic, where teenagers do too much, and everyone cheers.
Protecting Black spaces can’t mean embalming them. It means building them strong enough that people insist on being there. If the organizers go hard, viewers will tune in, not out of duty, but because the night insists. It’s up to the makers to give us that insistence. It’s on the rest of us to demand it. Right now, the door’s ajar. Whether it swings open again will be decided not by statements but by dates, rooms, and risk. Bring the room back, and the ritual returns with it.