TV review: The 71st Primetime Emmy Awards Emmys
tapped as outstanding drama series, the night's climactic award.Normally, when a show that was this much of a foregone conclusion ends an awards ceremony triumphant, especially a series I was this mixed on — for its final season, at least — that's a recipe for a bad awards show. But Sunday night saw the TV Academy largely break out of years of heavily mocked complacency and banality. The results weren't perfect, but they were often outstanding and very frequently surprising.
But normally when an awards show gets this many winners correct and is able to deliver this many passionate, emotional and thought-provoking speeches, that's a recipe for a good kudocast. Nope. I'm going to praise the voting, but I'm here to critique the things producers Don Mischer and Ian Stewart did right or wrong, not to reward them for things they got lucky on and as a telecast, the 71st Primetime Emmy Awards got lucky a lot and made one bad choice after another.
We have to start at the beginning, where I'm afraid that it must be said that if the Oscars in the spring proved that award shows don't require hosts to kick an evening off and carry momentum, the Emmys proved that sometimes hosts can be very, very, very helpful. Instead of a host, the show started with Homer Simpson getting hit by a piano and Anthony Anderson running around frantically stealing Emmys and Bryan Cranston giving a speech so pompous — "Television has never been bigger. Television has never mattered more. And television has never been this damn good" — it would have felt like parody, except that it was in no way parody. This is not to blame Cranston. Or Anderson. Or even Simpson. Hosts come out to set a tone.
It got worse. The Nick Cannon/Ken Jeong Tik-Tok shtick felt like an embarrassing effort to pander to a younger demographic that, if we're being totally frank, hasn't watched the Emmys for years, certainly didn't watch the Emmys this year and wouldn't have tuned in if you'd told them, "Ken Jeong is going to do five-plus minutes of his finest Tik-Tok material." It was brutal.
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