Good lord, the Emmys.
At this point, as fun as it is to complain, maybe it’s time to stop pointing fingers and start blaming ourselves.
It’s like a town that every spring, without fail, finds itself underwater again when the river breaches its bank. After 20 years of this, whose fault is it if we all refuse to consider that maybe those “100-year flood walls” had their numbers a little off?
I used to demand to know who is watching this (other than my dutiful colleagues). But I’m sure when the ratings come out, we’ll learn that the answer is basically no one. Maybe the ratings will be somewhere between Fox News coverage of the Republican midterm convention and an hour-long Amana infomercial unveiling a new line of customizable icemakers.
Think of it this way — last year’s ceremony hit a four-year viewership high with roughly 7.4 million viewers; Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with Texas Democrat James Talarico, which streamed only on YouTube, has more than 10 million views and counting; the lyric video for Stella Lefty’s “Boston” is up to almost 9 million views.
One of Hollywood’s great mysteries — up there with the Black Dahlia murder — is why the Television Academy, which has all the talent in television at its disposal, can’t produce a marginally watchable evening of television.
Why could an organization that went to such lengths to promise an entertaining broadcast — going so far as to remove five awards from the ceremony and kick them to the JV squad of Creative Arts — not even fill three hours with engaging material? Instead, the show ended with a whimper: movie stars Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey vamping and bantering just to run out the clock.
If you were shown last night’s event without explanation and heard me complaining about it, you’d probably say, Hey, that’s not fair! It’s not bad for the Ditech Quad-State Regional Sales Conference closing night! Their job is to reassure people that their financial security is safe in the event of fire, flood or tornado — not to come up with a bunch of bits!
If that’s who they were, you’d have to cut them some slack.
So where did it all go wrong? Let’s count the ways.
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Comments
Rushfield ably filling the Nikki Finke slot here. We appreciate your service.
this looks like an upscale senior center’s awards night, a way to pass the time while death lurks dutifully in the corner… maybe true in more ways than one
The only time I laughed was when Colbert said “if you like the jokes, the show was written by his former staff”. Ouch.
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