Even most of the "surprise" winners — like Will & Grace's Debra Messing for best comedy actress — had been nominated several times before. And if you were surprised by The West Wing's win for best drama — since even many of its fans thought it had a subpar year — you shouldn't have been. When it comes to picking Emmy winners, there's no substitute for old-fashioned cynicism. Phil Rosenthal, accepting the best comedy trophy for Everybody Loves Raymond, said it all: Emmys do not go to hip, edgy shows. And the Emmys (decided largely by people who make their livings in un-hip, un-edgy network TV) do not give series awards to cable shows. So what if The West Wing stank last year? It takes the Emmy voters at least three years to find out that a show stinks. The only thing the producers of The West Wing could have done to lose the Emmy was to move the show to HBO (full disclosure: that company and TIME are owned by the same parent corporation).
And if you're waiting for me to complain about it, keep waiting. No, I would not have given Emmys to many of the people and series who won them. (I would, for instance, have handed the best drama trophy to HBO's The Wire, which didn't get a single nomination.) But the Emmys are not about justice. They're not about determining the best performers and artists in TV. They're just about determining what people who work in TV like to watch on TV — and more important, what kind of TV they like to see rewarded.
And above all, the Emmys are about entertaining us. Forget all the hogwash about their being "a celebration of the TV business" — once an awards show occupies three-plus hours of national television, with paid advertisements, its sole duty is to amuse and never bore us. (This is why I've never felt sorry for any actor or actress who goes over the acceptance-speech limit and gets played off stage: if they want to give long, self-indulgent, weepy speeches, they can give the awards at a private, untelevised ceremony at a nice restaurant in L.A. and talk as long as they want.)
This year's show, however, was pretty soundly entertainment-free, ranging from the dutifully tasteful (tributes to John Ritter, Bob Hope and sundry others) to the weirdly tasteless (an old-age joke, directed at Doris Roberts, from Damon Wayans, who will be lucky if anyone is watching him on TV five years from now, let alone fifty). That's where I draw the line: you can give out statuettes to Edie Falco until the end of time, but you'd better make me laugh on the way there. Herewith, a few suggestions for next time:
More reality. Overlooked in all the TV industry's celebration of its past year was the fact that the top-rated entertainment programs of the season — Joe Millionaire and American Idol — were reality shows. If Joe Millionaire had been a scripted series, Evan Marriott would have been handing Bill Cosby his lifetime achievement award. Oh, sure, the Emmys threw reality a few bones. There are now a couple categories for reality: The Amazing Race got the best-deserved award (and perhaps most-needed, considering it hasn't yet been picked up for another season) for best reality competition. And celebrities from American Idol and Survivor turned up to give out marginal awards and introduce the accountants. But in an awards ceremony largely run by people who made their living in scripted TV, reality gets shafted hardware-wise. The Emmys are a commercial broadcast, so why not recognize a genre of TV that viewers are actually choosing to watch? Who, after all, wouldn't tune in to watch awards for Smarmiest Host or Best Elimination Ceremony?
Let Jon Stewart host. In fact, let Jon Stewart host every awards show. For anything. Ever. After a painfully dull monologue by Garry Shandling — who spent the entire time rocking wildly back and forth, as if he couldn't wait to dash off stage — Stewart killed with a you-can't-make-this-up highlight reel of TV news sensationalism over the war on terror (capped off with NBC News' Chris Jansing seriously asking an expert, "What can you tell us about Hispanic Muslims?"). "For too long," Stewart said, "the TV news industry has sacrificed its integrity for cheap entertainment value, yet has gone unrecognized on Emmy night." Later, he gave the night's the best acceptance speech line, winning for comedy writing and taking the podium with his all white-male writers: "I feel that diversity is the most important element in a writing staff."
Forget the movie stars. The Emmys for guest-star roles and for supporting roles in movies and miniseries are an annual joke: they're simply about seeing what movie actors happened to be on TV last year and thanking them for lowering themselves. (Attention Emmy voters: Juliette Lewis has not been a movie star since 1994.) The same went for this year's best miniseries award, which went to the mediocre Steven Spielberg Presents: Taken. Emmy voters, you can bet, got as far as reading "Steven Spielberg Pre--" before deciding that one.
Kill the infomercials. Rob Lowe and Alicia Silverstone appeared on stage together for no better reason than that each of them has an NBC drama debuting this week. Wanda Sykes — whose sitcom Wanda at Large appears on Fox, which aired the Emmys — plugged her show incessantly. The Emmy Awards do not need to become one giant commercial for the wonders of television. We're watching the Emmy Awards — we're already interested in television. If not, why would we sit through those lifetime achievement awards? On the bright side, the awards brought a promo that millions of Americans were anxious to see — that for Fox's Joe Millionaire 2. As rumored, the commercial confirmed, the second version of the faux-millionaire dating show will find women from other countries around the world, who haven't seen the first version and may in fact not own televisions. "We've lied to America," the promos said. "Now we're going to lie to the world!"
My guess: on the first episode, the producers present the girls with "irrefutable evidence" that their date has weapons of mass destruction. Nah. That's too far-fetched even for reality TV.