77th Annual Emmy Awards (National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, ABC-TV, aired September 20, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the Emmy Awards telecast on ABC-TV, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel (who, like just about everyone else in the country, I keep getting confused with Jimmy Fallon -- memo to Messrs. Kimmel and Fallon: can’t one of you call yourself “James”?) -- and if the recent American Country Music Awards had shown a good example of how you can do a viable awards show in the middle of a pandemic, the Emmys were a good example of how not to. The one interesting thing they did is patch in guest presenters who aren’t part of the industry but represent “essential workers” during the pandemic, including firefighters and grocery clerks, to open the envelopes and present the awards long-distance. There was a cute gimmick by which each of the five nominees for Best Late-Night Host got a black box, one of which would contain an Emmy while the other four had … well, we only got to see one and it had some confetti and a couple of Blu-Ray discs. The outcome of this category was disappointing in that once again our fave, Stephen Colbert, lost to John Oliver (whose show we couldn’t watch even if we wanted to because it’s on HBO -- the only time I’ve seen Oliver was on a YouTube clip ridiculing the continuing obsession of Southern white supremacists with honoring and romanticizing the Confederacy when a) their side lost and b), contrary to the assertion of neo-Confederates that the Civil War was about “states’ rights” or anything other than slavery, he quoted the secession ordinances themselves as well as the recorded statements of Confederate leaders that it was about maintaining slavery, and nothing else. But I’ve never seen Oliver’s actual show -- and I haven’t seen most of the award winners, either, for the same reason: they’re all on premium or streaming channels I’d have to pay a lot more money than I’m willing to spend on TV to get.

The big winner in the comedy department was a show called Schitt’s Creek -- and Kimmel inevitably joked that every time he mentioned the show he had to post its logo as a chyron on the bottom of the screen to make sure people knew he was saying the name of the show, spelled with a “c” and two “t”’s, just to specify that he wasn’t using the common vulgarism for excrement that has two fewer letters but is pronounced the same way. The synopsis for Schitt’s Creek on imdb.com reads, “When rich video-store magnate Johnny Rose and his family suddenly find themselves broke, they are forced to leave their pampered lives to regroup in Schitt's Creek.” It was created by Daniel Levy as a vehicle for his dad, Eugene Levy, who plays the lead role in the series (and Daniel is in it himself as his real-life dad’s son), though actress Catherine O’Hara plays Eugene’s wife. The show apparently has featured at least one Gay plotline -- there were some references to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (back in the early days of radio the Canadians wisely followed the public-driven model of their former colonial masters, Great Britain, instead of the lassiez-faire private-ownership model of the U.S.), which co-produced with an American cable channel called Pop (supposedly a basic-cable channel but one I’ve never heard of and certainly can’t get), and the relative freedom Daniel Levy and his writers had to explore topics that get seen gingerly, if at all, on American TV. (Though with Will & Grace having had two incarnations on American TV networks and a surprising number of other shows, including Modern Family, regularly featuring Queer characters this is hardly as pioneering as Levy fils made it sound.)

The big winner in the drama department was Succession, a show dealing with the sorts of family battles for control of a big media enterprises that have beset the Murdochs at Fox and the Redstones at Viacom. (The In Memoriam section of the show featured Sumner Redstone as one of this year’s deceased. It was about bloody time.) There were a lot of stupid jokes about the pandemic -- most notably the bizarre outfits in which the couriers who delivered the awards to the off-site winners, which looked like someone tried to cross-breed a haz-mat uniform and a spacesuit -- as well as one genuinely funny skit in which a group of industry people hold a New Year’s party for 2021 because they can’t wait for 2020 to be over already. There’s always a certain degree of industry self-celebration in these awards shows, and while the political references were kept veiled (neither the names “Trump” nor “Biden” were mentioned once), it was pretty clear that the members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences were members of the anti-Trump party (“party” used here not in its strictest political sense but in the more amorphous overall sense of describing America’s polarized camps, which differ not only in their ideologies but their conceptions of human nature and morality). A lot of the speakers used the word “empathy” to describe a quality they find lacking in the mass psychology, culture and politics and wish would come back -- which certainly ties in with the appeal the Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular are making to try to get voters to defeat Donald Trump -- who not only lacks empathy but is downright proud of that lack. (Trump’s ghostwriter Tony Schwartz once described his attitude as “stomp, stomp, stomp all the time,” and both Trump and a lot of other Americans mistake that for toughness and strength.)

I’m a bit surprised that the Los Angeles Times this morning described this year’s Emmys as a good response to the pandemic and the limitations it’s imposed on entertainment -- especially real-time entertainment (blessedly the show was telecast in real time on the West Coast, too, so at least on this occasion the East Coasters who run the American media world did not make us West Coasters suck hind tit with a delayed rebroadcast!) -- when I found it horribly lame in precisely that department, and I turned it off early to watch last night’s LIfetime “Premiere” movie.