Critic’s Notebook: Emmys Telecast Overcomes Predictability With Polish, Proficiency and Emotion

The Emmys were screwed.

Delayed by four months because of dual strikes that upended an entire industry for the better part of 2023, the 75th Primetime Emmys were, under the best of circumstances, going to be impossibly stale by the time they were presented in mid-January.

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When they’re presented in September, the Emmys have the awards landscape in general and specifically the TV awards landscape entirely to themselves — the culmination of an artificially constructed TV calendar designed to give pride of place to the TV Academy and its annual distribution of shiny baubles.

But with this new schedule, one that will hopefully 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 — that’s three awards shows that have given an overwhelming haul of trophies to Netflix’s Beef, HBO’s Succession and FX/Hulu’s The Bear, with most of the exact same honorees.

Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, Steven Yeun and Ali Wong are all spectacular actors, but none of them is quite gifted enough to express spontaneity and astonishment three times in eight days. So even if the Emmys are still the industry standard and the Golden Globes are still a joke, the Golden Globes telecast got all the shock and amazement, all the unforced and unplanned expressions of emotion. The Emmys got proficient polish. Nobody tunes in to an awards show looking to see winners giving proficient and polished speeches and no winner wants to be the person with the candor to say, “Yeah, I kinda knew this was coming, so here are the five people I forgot to thank last night and last Sunday,” even if they were all thinking it.

The Emmys were screwed by circumstance, and that’s before winter weather meant that there would be not one but two NFL playoff games vying for eyeballs on Monday afternoon and evening.

Plus, the Emmys screwed themselves. In the most varied landscape in television history, the TV Academy voters have consistently proven that they’re only capable of watching between three and five shows per year, no more and occasionally less. One could have easily predicted that Succession, The Bear and Beef were going to have a good night whether the 75th Primetime Emmys were held in September or January. But the degree of their three-pronged domination was generally suffocating for anybody or anything hoping for a surprise or two or three. Throw in the ongoing juggernauts that are RuPaul’s Drag Race and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, and I’m assuming that most Emmy pools for Sunday’s show will be won by people who got between 25 and 27 categories correct out of the 27 presented trophies.

There’s a lot of great TV out there that you keep missing, Emmy voters! And I say this as somebody who was entirely in favor of Succession and Beef ruling to some degree.

Yup.

Screwed.

Facing the inevitability of a repetitive set of winners, an exhausted Hollywood community and a distracted national viewing audience, the creative team behind the Emmys turned around and did something very strange: They made a good awards show, a smartly produced telecast that was crafted with the tacit acknowledgment that they couldn’t count on this slate of winners to carry the night in a deeply satisfying way. The producers knew they had to have actual ideas for how to fill three hours and, in that, they generally succeeded.

The secret of the show’s success? True affection for the thing that the show was celebrating. Sounds easy, right? Everybody watches movies and TV shows and most people love movies and TV shows, and it shouldn’t be hard to do a telecast celebrating Hollywood that embraces that affection. It shouldn’t be hard, and yet one need only think back to last Sunday’s Golden Globes for a show that, from the host to the showcased clips and presenters and tributes, had no evident warmth or appreciation for anything it was meant to be honoring.

The 75th Primetime Emmys were fueled by a love of television, by the visceral love for a never-more-ubiquitous medium that can be stirred by two or three notes of an indelible score or by a recognizable piece of production design or by seeing three or four of our favorite people in the same room together.

No two bits of TV love are the same and so no two tributes were structured in the same way or were meant to elicit exactly the same response. The pleasure of seeing Katherine Heigl standing next to her Grey’s Anatomy co-stars after so many years of bad press and lame punchlines isn’t the same as the deep and holistic warmth that comes from Ted Danson and friends sitting at a reproduction of the Cheers set. The almost shocking joy of watching Calista Flockhart, Greg Germann, Peter MacNicol and Gil Bellows dancing in the Ally McBeal bathroom isn’t the same as the melancholy of Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers standing in the All in the Family living room reflecting briefly on Norman Lear.

It wasn’t that the tributes all worked. Lorraine Bracco and Michael Imperioli hovering awkwardly in something resembling Dr. Melfi’s therapy office captured neither the lively bonhomie nor the operatic tenseness that made The Sopranos so great. I really wish that the reunion of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, reading the outstanding variety special category, could have been slightly better and more involved. Maybe my nostalgia for American Horror Story just wasn’t enough to sell an appearance by Dylan McDermott or the appearance of Anthony Anderson in the Rubberman suit. Did we really need both the casts of Martin and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia there for, as Charlie Day accurately pointed out, the same bit about how neither show received any Emmy attention at all?

Maybe we did! Because one of the things the producers realized smartly is that, especially when the group giving out awards is recognizing only three to five shows per year, a celebration of television can’t simply be a celebration of the kinds of shows that win Emmys. Because television is more than that. So the producers wanted to make sure that most viewers tuning in on Monday night got at least a taste of something meaningful to them. That’s without mentioning 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 first half of the show (the A-list-filled necrology surely delivered tears in the second half), coming out with a cane and slaying a string of punchlines.

I need somebody who was in attendance to tell me how many standing ovations the telecast included. “Too many to count” would be my official tally.

The telecast made pretty impressive use of Anthony Anderson, who has hosted countless game shows and awards shows over the years and is mostly an enthusiastic professional. He started the show singing and playing the piano, part of a medley of theme songs 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 suit from American Horror Story. He did patter with his mother, who was in the audience signaling for winners to wrap things up. He had no monologue and I didn’t miss it for a second.

If last week’s Golden Globes were a case study in how to instantly write a dismal host out of the telecast, the Emmys proved you can have a host who’s a constant and likable presence even if nothing he did the entire night was actually “hilarious.”

Instead, Anderson guided a show that ran faster than clockwork. With 20 minutes to go and only three awards to give out, Anderson had to vamp to kill a little time. With 10 minutes to go, an I Love Lucy tribute with Natasha Lyonne, Tracee Ellis Ross and a working chocolate conveyor belt was allowed to go on much longer than I think anybody anticipated.

Maybe that means the show could have been a little looser with the speeches? I would have traded some of that dead air to not have Jennifer Coolidge rushed through her acceptance, or to give breathing room to a diverse string of boundary-breaking winners, but there were maybe only two or three speeches that came across as truncated.

They were mostly solid, but unremarkable expressions of excitement and emotion, though there were positive exceptions. Kudos to Niecy Nash-Betts for the declaration, “I wanna thank me for believing in me,” and Steven Yeun for thanking his Beef character for “teaching me that judgment and shame is a lonely place, but compassion and grace is where we can all meet.” Good for Quinta Brunson, one of the few winners who hasn’t spent the past week accumulating trophies, for fighting back tears over and over again. I’ll let Kieran Culkin’s wife decide if it was kosher for his speech to include a plea for another child, but I laughed. And wasn’t it nice that John Oliver let one of his staffers give an acceptance speech? Or that, in absence of series creator Christopher Storer (whose two missed speeches also helped move things along), The Bear co-star and food consultant Matty Mattheson got to give a very excited and excitable speech?

Yeah, the Emmys were screwed and the telecast was solid anyway. Go figure.

Now Emmy voters? You’re gonna have to do this again in a few months. Please go catch up on Reservation Dogs.

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