Like you, I didn't know enough about the nominees to watch last night's Emmy Awards. I've also reached a certain saturation level with awards shows. I gather from the online chatter 'n' clips that it was the usual tedious and self-important event, that John Oliver won his usual two and that the broadcast networks won very little. About the only thing I wanted to see was the In Memoriam reel, which had more familiar names than usual. Here it is as broadcast and we'll discuss it after we watch it…
I can already hear two complaints about it, one being that a lot of people didn't get full-frame. The director was more interested in showing us the musical performers than the people the segment was about.
The other complaint was the usual "So-and-so" wasn't in it…and usually, some of that was because there's a cut-off date for the assembly of the montage and a few people who died the week before didn't make it in. This year, the Academy seems to have made a special effort to cut down on that. Norm Macdonald and Michael K. Williams were included.
The larger gripe each year is that someone decided that "So-and-so" did deserve inclusion and others didn't. If you wonder why they couldn't include everyone, go watch this video and force yourself to sit through the entire thing. It's on the Academy website and it's a list of everyone in the TV industry who passed in this past year. It's a little over seven minutes long and they probably still left someone out. Imagine that you were the person who had to decide who to include in the on-air presentation…and perhaps you will feel a twinge of sympathy for the folks who have to make those decisions.
And there's another reason to watch it in its entirety. I saw at least twenty names of people I worked with or knew casually…and I hadn't heard that they'd died. It might be more than twenty.