But did I miss anything (assuming any of you watched)?
I did come home and caught the In Memoriam segment and it was shocking how many people I knew. Of course the actors got most of the attention, but we lost some magnificent writers. Allan Burns, William Link, Charlie Hauck, William Blinn, Ann Beatts. How lucky we were to have them, and me especially for being friends with Allan Burns and Charlie Hauck. Roy Christopher, who was the set designer on FRASIER, BECKER, and quite a few Emmy ceremonies, was also included and that warmed my heart.
My other takeaway was what an embarrassment for the major broadcast networks that they were almost entirely shut out of any category that had a cable or streaming competitor. Netflix and HBO and Apple + dominated. Major networks aren’t even competitive. They don’t even get nominees.
Why these networks continue to air the show makes no sense. First off, the ratings are horrible, and why would CBS last night want to devote three hours to how great Netflix is? At some point the networks are going to say fuck it - let Amazon Prime carry them.
I’ll be writing this same article next year during the Oscars when Netflix wins everything there too.
41 comments :
Sadly, the "Mary Tyler Moore" show was represented four times as the In Memoriam segment honored Cloris Leachman, Ed Asner, Allan Burns, and Gavin MacLeod on a night that marked the 51st anniversary of MTM's premiere on CBS on Sept. 19, 1970.
Ken,
Have you gotten around to watching Only Murders In THe Building on Hulu yet? When I first saw the ad for the show I thought that Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selina Gomez were an odd grouping to lead a show, but damn if I wasn't wrong. I am really into darker comedy and smart writing, so this show is working for me. I was hoping to see your thoughts if you've watched it.
It's shoo-in.
I'd say shoo-in. As in shepherding something in by saying shoo at it.
You seem to be opposed to the streaming networks. I don’t care. Give me good content.
Was I the only one who thought the presentation of the "In Memoriam" segment was poorly done? Why did they have the two performers take up well over the half the screen, and the actual image & name a small area at the top?
At one point, they switched to full screen, it looked much better, but they switched back within seconds.
Really took away from the gravitas of the segment.
You are way ahead of me on putting the awards on stream, seeing as how they seem to have the winners.
Speaking of Roy Christopher, who was the set designer on BECKER, I've looked online for years to find the floorplan of Dr Becker's office. Does anyone know of a way to find it or if it is available online?
PS: Wish I had known about the Event Week publications you could send for. I loved every new TV season and could not believe that a whole industry was devoted to entertaining me.
Interesting that you have words you've only heard and not seen, like "shoo-in". Others (like me) have words we've only read and don't know how to pronounce. (At least, not until the web added pronunciation to the definitions.)
"Not that there was any suspense."? WandaVision had 23 nominations, but no wins.
Didn't see the show, but that stood out.
I'm not a robot
re: In Memoriam, thank God for the TV Academy Interviews (https://interviews.televisionacademy.com). I've watched many and it's one of the most worthwhile sites on the internet.
The "In Memoriam" segment was spoiled for me. Most of the time the camera was focused on the musicians, not the honorees. So disrespectful!
The program I was watching went to commercial so I flipped over to the Emmys as they were doing the "In Memoriam" segment. What a disgrace! We have a 55" TV and were unable to read the names on most of the honorees because either they pulled away to show the musicians and/or the graphics naming the people was in white script on usually a white or cream background. Is there any place I can read a list of the people?
I also had never seen "shoe/shoo-in" before. I always thought it was like "the shoe fits," so I would have guessed "shoe-in" also. As for another phrase, I always thought it was "deep seeded," as if something is planted so far down, its roots are too firmly trapped and the plant can't be pulled out. I was in my late 40s before I saw it as "deep seated," which doesn't make as much sense. People can still get up from a deep seat!
@Ken Levine: we all need a primer in semantics (typed with "tongue in cheek").
It is indeed shoo-in, like shooing chickens.
My main interest in awards shows these days is Quinn Cummings' Twitter feed critiquing the clothes. She's funny without being mean to the actors. (She's @quinncy.)
wg
"I was in my late 40s before I saw it as "deep seated," which doesn't make as much sense. People can still get up from a deep seat!"
Deep-seated refers to "seat" in the sense of fitting well, the way you might seat a window into a frame.
I mean... Does anyone actually watch these pretentious award shows anymore? Apparently not if you go by the ratings and then immediate forgetting of them after a day or two later. While blatant politics most certainly plays a part I think more than anything most of the stuff that gets nominated or win are shows most people have never seen or even heard of. Let's be honest the young demo of 18-49 aren't exactly interested in this stuff and the older viewers mostly tune out because again not hearing or watching the shows that are nominated or win. At this point award shows are just there for Hollywood to shamelessly pat themselves on the back publicly and that's it. That said I am happy to hear Jean Smart finally got the attention she deserves. She was so great on Designing Women and Frasier.
And yet this morning the complaint is no one black won a category. Apparently Ru Paul does not count.
Black host, black DJ (a DJ?), opening number honored a black rapper, many black nominees, black voice over, blind voting, yet the complaint is no one black won. Does that mean when Sudeikis won the presenter should have said nope, sorry, two many white guys, here you go Anthony Anderson?
Agree about Sunday night's In Memoriam segment being poorly produced. All decedents should be honored with a full screen image, and only the orchestra should provide solemn instrumental music.
I recently learned it's "under weigh" not "under way" because the reference is to weighing the anchor of a ship. English is strange.
Try watching the In Memoriam on YouTube. It's not ideal but you can make out all the names. I see NIGHT COURT lost Markie Post and Charles Robinson.
For those of us who grew up in the New York area Sonny Fox was the host of WONDERAMA on Saturday morning (remember kid shows on Saturday morning?), not an executive.
Why is it that the "In Memoriam" segment on these programs is so consistently botched year after year? At the Oscars, it was the blink-and-you'll-miss-them rotation speed of each slide. This year, it was the tiny presentation of the images in order to allow us to instead see musicians perform. (The brief eventual switch to the FULL SCREEN image of those slides was PERFECT. Too bad it went back to tiny images in the corner of my screen just as the slide for decades-long TV acting legend Ed Asner was shown. And -- maybe it was the small size of the images -- but did they leave out Tanya Roberts?
The "In Memoriam" thing was the only reason I watched the show, since I'd never heard of nearly all of the nominees or their programs this year. Thank good for the great improv bits we got from Conan O'Brien!
Did anyone add up how many times CBS cut to that one Black fellow in the audience who was wearing the white dress? Whoever that is, he got larger screen time than all of the "In Memoriam" people combined.
Why is it that the "In Memoriam" segment on these programs is so consistently botched year after year? At the Oscars, it was the blink-and-you'll-miss-them rotation speed of each slide. This year, it was the tiny presentation of the images in order to allow us to instead see musicians perform. (The brief eventual switch to the FULL SCREEN image of those slides was PERFECT. Too bad it went back to tiny images in the corner of my screen just as the slide for decades-long TV acting legend Ed Asner was shown. And -- maybe it was the small size of the images -- but did they leave out Tanya Roberts?
The "In Memoriam" thing was the only reason I watched the show, since I'd never heard of nearly all of the nominees or their programs this year. Thank good for the great improv bits we got from Conan O'Brien!
Did anyone add up how many times CBS cut to that one Black fellow in the audience who was wearing the white dress? Whoever that is, he got larger screen time than all of the "In Memoriam" people combined.
FQ: I looked at Jean Smart's Emmy history and saw she won in 2000 for playing Lorna Lynley on Frasier and then a year later won the same award (Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series) for Frasier, this time for playing Lana Gardner. Do you know of other times an actress or actor won multiple Emmy awards for the same show, but different characters? Or if it has happened a decent number of times, besides Jean Smart on Frasier, has it happened on a show you were involved with?
Outstanding comedy nominees. Cobra Kai? The Flight Attendant? Ted Lasso is hardly a comedy either.
That was going to be my Friday question for you, but you already answered it: Why the hell do the OTA networks even bother wasting their semi-valuable airtime showing this stuff when they basically get shut out year after year. Not counting the Creative Arts Emmys, NBC was the ONLY broadcast network that won anything on the telecast. I was surprised to see that the ratings had gone up by 16% from last years telecast. If I was a head honcho of a broadcast network, I'd be saying "We didn't win anything? Then get this shitty Emmy show off my network! I'll be damned if I'm going to provide free ads/promos for my competition on MY airwaves!" As far as the Emmys go, I almost turned it off in the first 5 minutes when they opened with a (c)rap song. But I stuck it out and, once again, everything that won I have not seen. Mostly because I ain't paying for streaming, doesn't make economic sense for me if there's only one or two shows I'd watch. I'll just wait for them to come out on DVD and if they don't....oh well!
Cedric the Entertainer was HORRIBLE. The bits just didn't work. The loudest laughs were elicited by Conan O'Brien's antics (which I did think were funny).
In response to Don Kemp:
The Black (I don't belong to a lower-case ethnicity) and POC winners were few and far between, but the real issue is that the Emmys seem to suffer from reflex and block voting. Many moons ago, Candice Bergen took her name OUT of competition because she had won FIVE Emmys for Murphy Brown and I think it was the fourth or fifth time she said, "I though Jenna Elfman was going to be standing up here".
However, I gather that when one strives to be good, many are not content with just being nominated, they want to WIN, which was jokingly referenced in a not-that-funny sketch during the verrrry long night.
Please take the "Don't they have enough?" comments elsewhere. I don't wish to go back to the days where White people played darned near every part and I had to be content to look at Jet Magazine to see where you could spot African-Americans on TV.
Is Netflix or Hulu winning too many Emmys really that much different than when HBO shows started cleaning up 20 years ago? Or even in the early-80s when CBS might've aired the ceremony, but NBC won all the awards for Hill Street Blues or Taxi?
I think a bigger issue is the streaming services and cable have fewer FCC restrictions, so they can push a lot more envelopes than the Big-4, and therefore make the broadcast networks look decades behind the times. Or maybe CBS could make police dramas that aren't reboots, NBC could make a drama set outside of Chicago or NYC, etc.
It's "shoo-in". I don't know why I even know this.
Also, I wasn't invited to this year's Emmys. This has been the case for over four decades for me, I think it's becoming a pattern.
I'd be okay with the Emmy Awards moving to some joint streaming model (maybe Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and Apple). F-bombs galore! Or let TNT do it, with running commentary from the NBA on TNT cast.
@John G - Lorna Lyndley and Lana Gardner were the same character. Lyndley was the maiden name of the character.
Per the Frasier wiki, the name had to be changed because there was a real person with the same name.
https://frasier.fandom.com/wiki/Lana_Gardner
https://www.goldderby.com/article/2021/emmys-2021-in-memoriam-not-honored/
Ditch the live performers and have orchestra play music so focus is on those being remembered.
@ Brian Phillips- is this directed at me?
"Please take the "Don't they have enough?" comments elsewhere"
If so, you completely misunderstood what I wrote.
So they left out a crap-load of people during the "In Memoriam" sequence. Then why not do like the news channels reporting stocks or "bites" of news headlines.....run a crawl along the bottom of the screen during the program listing those that passed away that aren't going to be mentioned in the obligatory "In Memoriam" part of the show. Whomever was responsible for this years segment should be drawn and quartered and probably failed Graphics 101. Postage stamp size pictures with actors names in white on light colored backgrounds? I was left guessing who some of these people were. It's like they were saying "Most of the people here don't know who these old fucks were and probably never heard of them anyways so let's shuffle through them faster then they passed away."
I think its a shoo-in that the genius at CBS who thought they could lure back the 18-34 demographic by opening the show with Cedric the Entertainer rapping with LL Cool J and Rita Wilson, is now packing his desk in a Chiquita banana box.
Cedric the Entertainer and LL Cool J are definitely not the lure for the 18-34 crowd. They've past that demographic for quite some time.
--Orleanas
All the streaming services advertise pretty heavily on the networks (the networks taking ads for each other's sports broadcasts was a relatively recent development, too). So it's all pretty much you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. No idea how the economics work. Or if the Emmys would give a network higher ratings than some random show (I was watching the football game anyway).
@DwWashburn
Here is the segment, so you should be able to make out all of the names at your own leisure:
https://www.emmys.com/video-gallery/in-memoriam#videoId=599701
If that is too much for you, Wikipedia may be helpful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/73rd_Primetime_Emmy_Awards
@Brandon in Virginia
If you notice, the Emmys are rotated among the four big networks. Therefore, it was luck of the draw if CBS was broadcasting a big night for NBC, like in 1984 when it was Cheers and Hill Street Blues winning the night. Although in your particular example, Taxi was an ABC show.
But now, FOX literally received no nominations. Why should they broadcast the show in 2023? At least in 2019 they still owned FX. I'm with everyone else that if the Emmys aren't going to honor actual television shows, then it shouldn't be broadcast on television.
Broadcast networks still air this because despite being lower compared to before, it still gets a good amount of live viewers, This year's Emmys has a major car sponsor too. As long as there are advertisers wiling to pay so why not continue? Who cares if streaming wins, all about the ad money
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