Thursday, September 20, 2018

The Emmys are Broken


So, the 70th annual Emmy Awards are in the books and I couldn’t care less.

It’s finally gotten to the point where there is so much TV out there, from so many different platforms, that putting shows into the existing Emmy categories is not just comparing apples to oranges; it’s comparing apples to salamanders to meteorites.

On the one hand you’ve got shows like Game of Thrones on a premium channel like HBO.  The show has been derisively referred to as “dragons and tits” because a large amount of the appeal of the show (particularly for young men) is the fact that they show CGI dragons and comely young women who regularly find themselves disrobing for reasons that are often (but not always) compelled by the plot (it’s always young women; if Diana Rigg ever does a topless scene, let me know).  It is hardly fair to put a show like Game of Thrones in the “best drama” category with a broadcast network show like This is Us.  Being a show on one of the financially strapped broadcast networks, it can’t afford the CGI to create dragons; being on broadcast TV it can’t show tits. 

For those of you interested in trivia, the last broadcast network show to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama was 24 way back in 2006.  For the past 12 years the winner for best drama has either been on basic cable (Mad Men, Breaking Bad) or premium cable (Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Homeland).   Since 2011, the two nominations for This is Us have been the only nominations for Outstanding Drama by a show on a broadcast network (not counting Downton Abbey on PBS).

It gets more confusing the deeper you dive into the award categories.  The 2018 winner for Outstanding TV Movie was “USS Callister,” which was not a TV movie but an episode of an anthology show, Black Mirror.  The same thing happened in 2017 with a previous episode of Black Mirror, “San Junipero,” and in 2016 an episode of the BBC series Sherlock, “The Abominable Bride,” won for best TV movie.  So, it’s been four years since a TV movie has won the Emmy for Outstanding TV Movie.

The category for “Outstanding Limited Series” is equally confusing, as many “limited series” (which originally referred to a single production over multiple episodes, like Roots or The Winds of War) now play out as regular series.  In 2017 the third season of Fargo was nominated for Outstanding Limited Series, despite the fact that after three seasons it is hard to see what is so ‘limited” about it.

The entry of streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon into television production further confounds analysis.  Mini-series, or “limited series,” used to play out over several nights, and sometimes produced the biggest audiences in TV history (such as the final episode of the original Roots).  Now Netflix will dump a new “series” out all at once, and no one has any idea what the “ratings” are because Netflix doesn’t release that information.  If enough people watch it, like Stranger Things, then it comes back and it is a dramatic series; if not enough people watch it, then it ends after one “season” and becomes a limited series after the fact.

The most recent development that annoys me no end is that now shows are taking the lead from Mad Men (I believe they were the first to do it) and dividing their final season of 13 episodes into two 6- or 7-episode seasons, which they then break up to compete in the award periods of two different seasons.  The result is that actors may win an Emmy in 2018 for acting they did in 2016 for a show that was scheduled to be shown in 2017. 

Calling six or seven episodes a “season” borders on ridiculous, especially when looking back and realizing that TV shows used to be expected to produce 28-30 shows per season.  The present standard for broadcast network television is 22.  This is another disadvantage broadcast network dramas have competing against premium cable shows; it is much easier to maintain high quality over 8 episodes rather than 22.  But broadcast networks must fill 3 hours a day, seven days a week with programming; HBO can simply rerun the same episodes of Game of Thrones over and over and over. 

With the vast ocean of programming out there, the process of choosing five, or six, or even ten nominees in each category becomes futile.  How can those responsible for selecting the nominees possibly watch even a small percentage of those eligible, even looking at screeners submitted by the actors?  Netflix alone produced 50 new series last year.  With such a cacophony of various shows vying for attention, how do you pick out the five or six or even ten “best” performances by a supporting actor in a comedy? 

What is an Emmy “snub” anymore?  How can you get upset over the failure of Aya Cash to be nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy for You’re the Worst, or likewise Kristen Bell for The Good Place?  And those are just some examples I know about—maybe there is a show streaming on Hulu, or on some small cable channel that I’ve never heard of, that has the best actress in a comedy but the show got no buzz so I (and almost no one else) even knows about it.

And don’t even get me started on people from Saturday Night Live winning Emmys as supporting “actors” when all they do is perform in sketches.  That’s not acting, that’s doing comedy.  It may be funny (usually it’s not), but it isn’t creating a three-dimensional character from a script.

At the Westminster Dog Show you have Labradors competing against poodles competing against sheepdogs, but at least they all have four legs and bark.  The current Emmys are like a literal Miss Universe pageant where you are evaluating the attractiveness of humans, Venusians, and Alpha Centaurans.  It almost makes me want to go back to the good old days when only broadcast network shows competed for Emmys and shows on cable had to be content with the Cable ACE Awards. 

The Emmys have always had a plethora of difficulties.  Unlike the Oscars and the Tonys, shows continue on for years and actors can get “automatic” re-nominations for the same role long after they’ve started phoning it in.  The development of hour-long comedies such as Northern Exposure and Ally McBeal blurred the distinction between comedy and drama, something pushed to extremes with “dramedies” like Gilmore Girls.  The ability of premium cable shows to do grittier material with no content controls on nudity and profanity put network shows at a disadvantage.  And now the glut of shows produced by streaming services threatens to overrun the entire industry.

Can the Emmys be fixed?  I don’t see how.  They’ll continue on, because the entertainment industry loves giving out awards.  But their relevance will fade until the show itself becomes a Netflix special.



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