My old pal Pat O'Neill and I used to engage in big (but friendly) arguments in online forums. We agreed on so little about comics that when we did agree, some folks took it as a sign that we had to both be right. Here is a wise, I think, message Pat sent me about the Emmy Awards…
I think the problem with the Emmys is that the television audience has become so fractionated (if that's a word) that it is no longer a "mass medium." I'm not even sure you can call most of what it does "television" anymore, since so few people are actually watching these programs on TV sets. It certainly can't be called "broadcasting" anymore.
When there were only three or four or five networks, you could be certain that some substantial percentage of the audience (at least 20%) had at least heard of the shows and people that were nominated. Quite honestly, I didn't know a show called Fleabag even existed until I heard it announced as a nominee. Imagine my surprise when it wound up winning most of the comedy series awards.
This leads in to my opinion that they made a major mistake by not having a host. A host might have been able to weave all these disparate threads into a coherent tapestry. Instead it felt, to me, like a new award show about every 30 minutes as they shifted gears to a different genre.
One more gripe: The speech by the head of the TV Academy was purest hype for the industry. On other award shows — like the Oscars and Tonys — that speech is used to talk about the things the presenting organizations (the Motion Picture Academy, the Theater Wing and the League of Broadway Producers) do to foster the arts they celebrate — the museums they run, the educational programs they support, etc. Is the TV Academy doing nothing of that sort worth mentioning? Or is the industry as a whole afraid the TV audience doesn't really believe the hype about this being the "platinum age" of TV, as it was called in that speech?
I didn't see the speech you mention because I still haven't watched the whole show, nor is anyone recommending that I do. I do think awards shows often get a bum criticism the same way some televised baseball games are faulted for being boring. Not all games are exciting and that isn't the fault of the those who produce the telecasts. A lot of folks are upset that their favorite shows didn't win or weren't nominated. Yeah, and when I followed the Dodgers back in the Sandy Koufax era, I didn't much like any game where they lost or no one made a spectacular play.
Not the fault of the producers…nor is it their fault when the winners don't give memorable or funny acceptance speeches. I did watch John Oliver's two acceptances this time and they were disappointing. (It was classy, I thought, of Mr. Oliver when he and all the other writers on his program went up to accept theirs, to let one of the other writers make the speech. But even that classy move was undermined though because the backdrop of that acceptance was a giant photo of John Oliver's face.)
Anyway, I agree with Pat that a big problem with the Emmys is that the industry is becoming so…I believe the word is "fractionalized." I've never watched a lot of the nominated or winning shows…or watched them enough to have any particular rooting interest in them. Fleabag is a great show — or at least, that's my conclusion based on what little I've seen of it. Having not seen all the other nominees, I can't very well say it's the best in its category though.
For a long time, a working premise of an awards show like this has been that if, for example, you've never watched Fleabag, its win is likely to motivate you to tune in and check it out. I wonder how true that is. It seems to me that, given the way we're now so fractionalized — there's that word again — in so many ways, folks are more likely to think, "How dare they give the award to a show I've never heard of?" And they come away with a negative impression of the show because it seems undeserving. I could probably draw some parallel to the way we approach politics nowadays if I was in the mood for a bit of heavy lifting.
Anyway, I agree with Pat. It's hard to embrace a ceremony that seeks to celebrate excellence in television when we're not all on the same page as to just what "television" is these days. There isn't even a simple definition of "prime time" when we can watch some of these shows any time we choose. The whole art form and industry have changed and if they're going to give out awards, the rules need to change…a lot.
I was once on a committee at the Academy — the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to use its full name — that was trying to refine the way they handed out Emmy Awards for animation on Saturday morning. Today, they might need one committee just to define "animation"..and another to figure out what and when "Saturday morning" is. Thanks, Pat.