Emmys

Last night’s winners, losers and what the Emmys tell us about the psychology of television right now

The moments, misspeaks and make-outs that everyone’s talking about from TV’s big night

The Emmys are on Monday. See how your picks align with our critics’.

This was something I should have brought up right after the Emmys, but I’ll bring it up now; consider it a very far-in-advance post about next year’s Emmys. Seeing the entire Modern Family adult cast up for Emmys again, I heard a few people saying that it’s a shame the kids on Modern Family are never recognized by the awards. The kids, particularly Rico Rodriguez as Manny and Ariel Winter as Alex, arguably outshine most of the grown-ups. But it’s not surprising that they aren’t nominated: kid actors are almost never nominated for TV shows.

Like the Oscar nominations, this year’s Emmy nominations reflect the opinions of the people who do the nominating

After two straight years in which there had been only two nominees for Best Miniseries, the TV Academy’s rules gave it the right to eliminate that category, and that’s what it’s done, by merging it with Best TV Movie. This is in line with the way other awards do it, but it’s still a sad reminder of the decline of the full-fledged limited-run miniseries. It’s understandable why they’ve declined; there’s usually a preference for making something a continuing series. There are shows today that could have been, and possibly would have been, miniseries in another era; you could see The Walking Dead as a miniseries with a possible sequel to come if it catches on, rather than a six-episode first season with many more seasons to come. Not everything should be an open-ended series, but most things are going to be — an obvious exception being Trudeau or John Adams type of stories about historical figures, which have to end but are too big to fit into one movie.

Team beats 60 Minutes, 48 Hours and Nightline in investigative journalism category

Finally some “new blood”; but not of the ‘True Blood’ variety

Well, there isn’t a lot to say about them, since they mostly gave the awards to the same people as last year. I keep thinking that the Emmys’ preference for Mad Men and especially 30 Rock signifies a certain preference for hard-hearted coldness on the part of the Emmy voters. For some, Mad Men is easier to admire than to love, and encourages a certain amount of audience distance from the subject, characters and time period (though there’s a very valid counter-argument that the distancing effects don’t actually preclude emotional involvement, they just make us look at the issues in a more clear-eyed way). And 30 Rock is sort of a technocratic comedy, where the joke writing is on a high level, but almost every character is a cartoonish lunatic. The closest thing the show has to a human being is Jack, who — and I’m sorry for repeating myself — has become the show’s straight man and voice of sanity as Liz has become a complete psycho. Its lack of mainstream success is no more surprising than that of Arrested Development, another extremely well-crafted comedy that didn’t have a lot of characters who bore much resemblance to human beings.

I didn’t have a chance for an Emmy live-blog (which would boil down in any case to “somebody just won something” over and over, especially since I’m not very good at writing about the important thing: clothes). I’ll have some thoughts after the full list of winners is available. I will say that the Hairspray songwriting team, which wrote Neil Patrick Harris’s song material for the Tonys and Emmys, should just write special material for him all the time. Harris is fun, though he seems to have a sore throat at times and isn’t always great at thinking on his feet and coming up with a “saver” or a response to an unexpected audience reaction; that’s what professional comedians are good at doing, but I think it’s worth trading that off to get Harris’s likability.

Well, I would have preferred if the Emmys had made this decision yesterday, before the magazine went to press, but better late than never, I suppose: the Academy of TV Arts and Sciences has given up on the “time-shifting” experiment.

The clumsy, lumbering attempts of the networks to basically blackmail the Academy members into nominating more popular shows are not going very well for them at the moment. The decision to cut eight presentations from the show was bad enough; what made it worse was that Emmy producer Don Mischer openly admitted they were doing this to make room for more popular (but under-nominated) shows on the broadcast. It’s a known fact that every awards show is simply an evening-length advertisement for the industry, and that the industry would therefore prefer its most valuable properties to be highlighted, but it’s supposed to be an unspoken known fact.