The 70th Primetime Emmy Awards looked like the worst Emmys ever

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ba...awards-1145010

The 60th Primetime Emmy Awards 10 years ago featured the debacle of five reality TV hosts co-hosting, but this year's ceremony was much worse. "It was," says Tim Goodman, "the worst Emmys telecast I've ever seen. That's not hyperbole. (Maybe there was a telecast as bad when I was a teenager and wasn't paying attention?) It was lifeless, it was dull, it was poorly produced, terribly written and it had hosts who should not have been hosting (they aren't well-known enough and, last night, were not funny enough and not engaging enough). The pairing of presenters was ill-conceived. The material given them was pathetic. Nearly every 'bit' in the show imploded upon itself. The staging looked like it came from 1978. People looked like they didn't want to be there. The fact that the television industry, on a night when it is supposed to celebrate its own achievements, can't actually make a TV event that is interesting is really pathetic." Goodman blamed the Television Academy. "It needs more oversight," he says. "It can't just let Lorne Michaels and NBC take over the Emmys and bore the life out of the country.

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  ESPN boasts that Monday Night Football beat the Emmys -- even though MNF had its worst Week 2 ratings ever
  #OscarsSoWhite creator pushes for Emmys diversity: "How many non-Black people of color do you remember during @TheEmmys last night?"
  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Barry stars won because Emmy voters love shows about show business
  Hannah Gadsby's brief appearance was a welcome detour from the pre-chewed and inoffensive banter of SNL
  Black-ish's Jenifer Lewis wore Nike on the red carpet to show her support for Colin Kaepernick
  Pre-taped categories robbed viewers of hearing celebrities mispronounce nominee names
  Angela Bassett responded to The New York Times mistaking her with Omarosa with an Olivia Pope GIF

Maybe the Emmys should adapt the "Popular Award" that the Oscars proposed

Sure, a hit show like Game of Thrones won the top drama award last night. But as Peter Rubin points out, "trophy after trophy went to the most prestigious of prestige TV: Netflix's Queen Elizabeth II bio-series The Crown; FX's Cold War domestic espionage cat-and-mouse The Americans; Amazon's upstart comedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; HBO's ... everything. No question, these were deserving shows and performances. Henry Winkler? Still a treasure, even if his Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series award for Barry came at the expense of Atlanta's far more deserving Brian Tyree Henry. Meanwhile, some of the television series I've had the most conversations about it—the good kind, the morning-after-Slackathon kind, the "oh, you've gotta watch this" kind—got overlooked... All of which makes me wonder if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences might have been on to something with its proposed-then-scrapped idea to introduce a 'outstanding achievement in popular film 'Academy Award category—not for the Oscars, but the Emmys."

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• Emmys allowed Lorne Michaels and his SNL stars to run wild, forgetting that they're supposed to be the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players"
  The Emmys did break diversity records, but it was during the Creative Arts Emmys
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  Oscars director Glenn Weiss and his new fiancé met at an awards show: The Tonys in 2001
  Ryan Murphy says he feels like he's "in the club" after his American Crime Story directing Emmy win
  New York Times to issue a correction after mistaking Angela Bassett for Omarosa in an Emmys caption
  Henry Winkler says winning his first Emmy "feels unbelievable"

Emmys became a bloated SNL episode

Lorne Michaels decided to turn the entire Emmys telecast "over to Saturday Night Live and Saturday Night Live-adjacent personalities in a way that no single show has ever dominated the Emmy proceedings in my lifetime," says Daniel Fienberg. The SNL bloat could be seen with longtime cast member Kenan Thompson being part of the beginning and the ending of the show. "Heaven knows I'm an appreciator of Thompson and his marvelous SNL legacy and his impressive pre-SNL legacy, but there's a statement you're making when you have Kenan Thompson present for outstanding drama series and it's something along the lines of, 'The history of television is, for tonight, all about just one show," says Fienberg. He adds: "Imagine CBS using its platform a decade ago to only let various cast members from CSI and its respective spinoffs present. Or ABC doing an Emmys telecast in which each award is presented by somebody from the Bachelor franchise. This was a bad look for NBC and for Michaels, and it'd be hard to begrudge any future network in this Emmys rotation thinking that skipping NBC talent for presentations would be fair play."

ALSO:

• UPDATE: 70th Primetime Emmys hit a new ratings low, based on early numbers
  A cringey, tone-deaf embarrassment and an enraging slog: This was the worst-produced awards show since James Franco and Anne Hathaway co-hosted the Oscars
  The Emmys joked about TV's lack of diversity, and then demonstrated it by handing out 22 of 26 awards to white nominees
  Michael Che and Colin Jost had the energy of two students giving a dutiful book report: Their jokes suggested they barely watched TV, and they looked like they'd rather be anywhere else
  It seemed like every presenting pair would've made better hosts than Che and Jost
  Opening "We Solved It" number upstaged hosts Che and Jost, making them uncomfortable, unfunny afterthoughts
  There should've been some award show chaos -- instead, Che and Jost took these crazy times and turned them into something humdrum
  Perhaps what was most admirable about the telecast was how little Trump came up
  It's remarkable that an Emmy ceremony that emphasized diversity awarded statues to shows that barely addressed race at all
  Honorees created moments that felt bigger than the show encasing them, from Henry Winkler to Thandie Newton
  Emmys steering clear of overt political gestures was a welcome change from last year
  Netflix topped all networks with five Emmy wins Monday night, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel led all shows with five wins
  Overall, HBO and Netflix tied with each taking home 23 Emmy awards this year
  Oscars director Glenn Weiss on his surprise Emmy proposal: I expected the Emmys director to cut me off and play me out
  Glenn Weiss considered warning the Emmys director about his proposal -- but the Emmys director was a rival in his category
  NBC's SNL and ABC's Oscar ceremony were the only broadcast winners Monday night
  John Oliver weighs in on Emmys ignoring Trump: “In the drinking game, I think we’re just trying to keep America sober"
  RuPaul wasted his RuPaul’s Drag Race historic Emmy victory by focusing himself instead of the LGBTQ community
  Atlanta was completely shut out as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel dominated the comedy categories
  Emmy winners (The Americans) and losers (Emmy bits)
  More winners (old people) and losers (the loudest crowd in recent memory)
  Darren Criss' lead actor in a limited series victory marked the second year in a row that an actor of Asian descent won in the category
  Hannah Gadsby nearly stole the show with her one minute of Emmys glory
  Emmys bleeped out Thandie Newton saying "I am so f*cking blessed to work with the people I have gotten to work with"
  Six of the most awkward moments: From the silences to Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph's awkward bit
  Donald Glover's Atlanta character Teddy Perkins was spotted in the audience -- played by SNL alum Jay Pharoah
  Henry Winkler and Ron Howard had a Happy Days reunion in the audience

#MeToo movement was glaringly missing at the Emmy Awards
The #MeToo and Time's Up movements that were a big part of the Golden Globes and Oscars ceremonies earlier this year were almost completely missing at Monday's Emmy ceremony. "Unlike at previous awards shows this year, emblems of the movement weren’t pinned to lapels or sequined gowns. #MeToo was mostly absent from acceptance speeches and even from the monologue — except for fleeting jokes by the hosts, Michael Che and Colin Jost," says Maya Salem. Even Les Moonves went unmentioned, while the words "Time's Up" were only mentioned once, by The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel's Amy Sherman-Palladino. ALSO: Les Moonves was to network television what Harvey Weinstein was to independent film, so why wasn't he brought up?

How to fix awards shows in wake of the Emmys debacle

"Let it be a mess," says Rob Sheffield, offering some suggestions for shaking up the award show format. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler showed during their three-year run on the Golden Globes that a messy award show is a great award show. "A simple formula: celebrities plus live TV plus free champagne equals a few hours of insanity," says Sheffield. Another suggestion: Get a star to host. "A few years ago, the network bosses got a silly idea in their gullivers — the idea that an award show’s job was to promote the in-house late-night franchise," says Sheffield. "So every fete began to get hosted by the network’s resident late-night straight white guy. Hey, what a crazy coincidence: This is when ratings cratered. Sure, Jimmy Kimmel does a fine job hosting the Oscars. That’s not the problem. The problem is he does an equally fine job five damn nights a week — so do Colbert, Fallon, Myers, Corden. It’s just not a big deal to see these guys put on a suit and tell some jokes. So they’re a fatal glamour drain — as Colbert’s former alter ego might have put it, they kill the eventiness. When LL Cool J hosted the Grammys, it was a must-see every year. But ever since Corden took over, the ratings have been fading faster than Canibus in a rap battle. So it’s simple: bring back LL. Mama said knock you out!"