The Emmys were screwed.
Delayed four months due to dual strikes that disrupted an entire industry for most of 2023, the 75th Primetime Emmys were going to be, at best, incredibly stale when they were presented in mid-January .
When they roll out in September, the Emmys have the awards landscape in general and the television awards landscape in particular all to themselves: the culmination of an artificially constructed television calendar designed to give pride of place to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Television and its annual distribution of awards. shiny ornaments.
But with this new schedule, one that we hope will never be repeated, the Emmys were stuck as the third awards show honoring television in eight days. The Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards and now the Emmys: they are three awards shows that have given an overwhelming number of trophies to Netflix. BeefHBO Succession and FX/Hulu Bearwith the majority of the same honorees.
Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, Steven Yeun and Ali Wong are spectacular actors, but none of them are talented enough to express spontaneity and wonder three times in eight days. So even if the Emmys remain the industry standard and the Golden Globes remain a joke, the Golden Globes telecast received all the shock and awe, all the unforced and unplanned expressions of emotion. The Emmys got a competent polish. No one tunes in to an awards show to see winners giving competent, polished speeches, and no winner wants to be the person with the candor to say, “Yeah, I knew this was going to happen, so here are the five people I forgot.” thank you last time.” night and last Sunday,” even if everyone was thinking it.
The Emmys were screwed by circumstances, and that was before winter weather meant there would be not one but two NFL playoff games vying for attention on Monday afternoon and evening.
Plus, the Emmys were ruined. In the most varied landscape in television history, TV Academy voters have consistently shown that they are only capable of watching three to five shows a year, no more, no less. It could have easily been predicted that Succession, Bear and Beef We’d have a good night whether the 75th Primetime Emmys were held in September or January. But the extent of his triple dominance was generally suffocating to anyone or anything expecting a surprise, two or three. Add ongoing monsters that are RuPaul’s Drag Race and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and I’m guessing that most of the Emmys for Sunday’s show will be won by people who got between 25 and 27 categories right out of the 27 trophies presented.
There’s a lot of great television you’re still missing, Emmy voters! And I say this as someone who was totally in favor of Succession and Beef govern to a certain extent.
Yeah.
Screwed.
Faced with the inevitability of a repetitive string of winners, an exhausted Hollywood community and a distracted national audience, the creative team behind the Emmys turned around and did something very strange: They made a good awards show, a smartly produced and designed telecast with the tacit acknowledgment that they couldn’t count on this list of winners to carry the night in a deeply satisfying way. The producers knew they had to come up with real ideas about how to fill three hours, and for the most part, they succeeded.
The secret to the program’s success? True affection for what the show celebrated. It sounds easy right? Everyone watches movies and television shows and most people love movies and television shows and it shouldn’t be difficult to make a television broadcast that celebrates Hollywood and embraces that affection. It shouldn’t be difficult, and yet you only have to think back to last Sunday’s Golden Globes to see a show that, from the host to the clips shown to the presenters to the tributes, had no obvious warmth or appreciation for anything it did. I had to honor. .
The 75th Primetime Emmy Awards were driven by a love of television, a visceral love for an increasingly ubiquitous medium that can be enlivened by two or three notes of an indelible score or a piece of production design. recognizable or seeing three or four of our favorite people together in the same room.
No two pieces of television love are the same, and therefore no two tributes are structured in the same way or intended to provoke exactly the same response. The pleasure of seeing Katherine Heigl with her Grey’s Anatomy co-stars after so many years of bad press and lame jokes is not the same as the deep, holistic warmth that comes from Ted Danson and his friends sitting in front of a reproduction of the Health place. The almost shocking joy of watching Calista Flockhart, Greg Germann, Peter MacNicol and Gil Bellows dance in the Ally McBeal The bathroom is not the same as the melancholy of Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers standing in the Everyone in the family living room reflecting briefly on Norman Lear.
Not that all taxes worked. Lorraine Bracco and Michael Imperioli, hovering clumsily in something resembling Dr. Melfi’s therapy office, caught neither the lively bonhomie nor the operatic tension that made The sopranos So great. I really wish Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s reunion, reading the outstanding variety special category, had been a little better and more involved. Maybe my nostalgia for American horror story It just wasn’t enough to sell a Dylan McDermott appearance or Anthony Anderson’s appearance in the Rubberman suit. Did we really need both casts of Martin and It’s always sunny in Philadelphia Is there, as Charlie Day accurately pointed out, the same thing about how neither show received Emmy attention?
Maybe we did! Because one of the things the producers smartly realized is that, especially when the awards group recognizes only three to five shows a year, a celebration of television can’t simply be a celebration of the kinds of shows that win awards. Emmy. Because television is more than that. So the producers wanted to make sure that the majority of viewers tuning in on Monday night would get at least a taste of something meaningful to them. That’s not to mention the industry icons who appeared simply as presenters, including Carol Burnett, Marla Gibbs and Dame Joan Collins, or Christina Applegate, who delivered the most emotional moment of the show’s first half (the A-list-filled obituary surely delivered tears in the second half), coming out with a stick and killing a series of shots.
I need someone who was present to tell me how many cheers the broadcast included. “Too many to count” would be my official count.
The broadcast made pretty impressive use of Anthony Anderson, who has hosted countless game shows and award shows over the years and is primarily an enthusiastic professional. He began the show singing and playing piano, part of a medley of musical numbers that wasn’t my favorite, but at least set an immediate and energetic tone. He went through a variety of costume changes, including the aforementioned restrictive costume of American horror story. She chatted with her mother, who was in the audience waving the winners to finish. He didn’t have a monologue and I didn’t miss a single second of it.
If last week’s Golden Globes were a case study in how to instantly remove a depressing host from the broadcast, the Emmys showed that you can have a host who has a consistent, likable presence even if nothing he did during The whole night was really “fun”.
Instead, Anderson directed a show that went by faster than clockwork. With 20 minutes left and only three awards to hand out, Anderson had to scramble to kill some time. With 10 minutes left, a I love Lucy The tribute with Natasha Lyonne, Tracee Ellis Ross, and a working chocolate conveyor belt was able to last a LOT longer than I think anyone anticipated.
Maybe that means the show could have been a little more relaxed with the speeches? It would have changed some of that dead air to keep Jennifer Coolidge from rushing into acceptance, or to give breathing room to a diverse series of boundary-breaking winners, but there were perhaps only two or three speeches that seemed truncated.
They were mostly solid but unremarkable expressions of excitement and emotion, although there were positive exceptions. Congratulations to Niecy Nash-Betts for the statement “I want to thank me for believing in me” and to Steven Yeun for thanking his Beef character for “teaching me that judgment and shame are a lonely place, but compassion and grace is where we can all find each other.” Good on Quinta Brunson, one of the few winners who didn’t spend last week racking up trophies, for fighting back tears again and again. I’ll let Kieran Culkin’s wife decide if it’s kosher for her speech to include a plea for another child, but I laughed. And wasn’t it nice that John Oliver let one of his employees give an acceptance speech? Or that, in the absence of series creator Christopher Storer (whose two missed speeches also helped things move forward), Bear Could co-star and food consultant Matty Mattheson give a very emotional and exciting speech?
Yeah, the Emmys were fucked up and the broadcast was solid anyway. Go figure.
Emmy voters now? You’ll have to do this again in a few months. Please catch up Reserve dogs.