Emmy's Ultimate Embarrassment
By Ed Martin TV / Video Download Archives
For the first time in a long time, Emmy got it right. The selection of winners, I mean. The awards ceremony itself sucked out loud.
That’s an indelicate statement, to be sure. But maybe it’s time for critics and everyone else connected to the business of television to get nasty about this. The Emmy Awards ceremony gets worse every year, and that hurts television, which is lately taking enough lumps. Something has to be done.
The 60th Primetime Emmy Awards was an historic event, in that a record number of pay cable and basic cable programs received top honors, while AMC’s Mad Men became the first basic cable series to win the award for Outstanding Drama Series. The winners, nominees and viewers all deserved better than they got.
It is one thing for the producers of this extravaganza to try new things and fail. Last year’s Emmys-in-the-Round silliness does come immediately to mind: The show was dreadful and host Ryan Seacrest was a big disappointment. But it at least represented an effort to think outside the box. This year’s ceremony, on the other hand, was entirely traditional, and they still screwed it up. You know you’re in trouble when so many winners and presenters openly complain about a ceremony’s lousy content and bad pacing during the show!
I think the best moment of the night was when Kathy Griffin, who joined legendary insult comic Don Rickles on stage for the first of his two appearances, screamed at the audience, “Get up! Get up!”, bullying them into giving Rickles a well deserved standing ovation. (Ultimately he would receive two.) Indeed, Rickles’ off-the-cuff cracks when he took his bows for two wins (both for HBO’s Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project) were funnier than any of the scripted crap that had been written for the dozens of presenters throughout the night. (That Laugh In bit was especially atrocious!) Assuming said writers are members of the Writers Guild of America, the organization that largely gutted the 2007-08 television season, they had a hell of a nerve serving up such insipid tripe after participating in a strike over compensation issues. If anything, they deserve a pay cut.
It’s hard to isolate a single worst moment, but I’ll go with Tom Bergeron and William Shatner tearing away Heidi Klum’s tuxedo to reveal a sexier outfit. As we learned when Justin Timberlake ripped Janet Jackson’s top off during the Super Bowl XXXVII half-time show, to calamitous effect, there is nothing even mildly amusing about men treating women in a rough manner.
I can’t put all of the blame for the lifeless, at times embarrassingly awkward telecast on the writers, because the entire mess felt, in a word, unrehearsed. It’s as if everyone involved showed up two hours before show time and stumbled their way through it. I won’t say that the talent on stage seemed to be improvising because that would be an insult to talented improvisational performers everywhere.
Last year, egregiously over-exposed reality television personality Ryan Seacrest proved to be a surprisingly bland Emmy host. So I guess we should have seen this year’s disaster coming, because this time around Seacrest was joined by four additional reality toppers, and every one of them flopped, including the normally dependable Tom Bergeron. I actually believe Bergeron could have pulled it off on his own – without Seacrest, Howie Mandel, Jeff Probst and Heidi Klum. But watching these five people fumble through an overlong introductory segment (following a classy opening by Oprah Winfrey) and listening to them ramble on about having no prepared material to work with was painful. It was downhill from there every time these folks took the stage.
Fortunately, there was much pleasure to be had in learning who the Emmy winners turned out to be. I was especially thrilled that Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston was honored. (Why his win shocked so many critics is a mystery to me. Didn’t they watch his show?) As much as I would have liked Kyra Sedgwick to win for The Closer, I was happy to see Glenn Close honored for Damages. Ditto Close’s co-star, Zeljko Ivanek, one of two very deserving surprise winners of the evening. (The other was Jean Smart for Samantha Who? Who knew?) Dianne Wiest’s win for In Treatment also seems to have been a surprise, but it wasn’t to me. I was happy to see Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey take home the top comedy awards for 30 Rock. I didn’t see the need to honor Jeremy Piven with a third Emmy for his role in Entourage, but he was a humble and gracious winner, so I’ll give him a pass.
Emmys? Bad? Maybe. But Worst Ever? Come on.
By: Elaine Liner
Ed Martin
Ed Martin is the chief television and content critic for MediaVillage. He has written about television and internet programming for several Myers publications since 2000, including The Myers Report, The Myers Programming Report, MediaBizBloggers a…
