One of my favourite film writers Guy Lodge tweeted this week, “Say what you like about the Oscars, but at least they’re not the Emmys. Imagine The King’s Speech winning Best Picture four years in a row”. After that, I considered not writing anything on the annual television awards at all.
Observing the casual, comfortable way that the Modern Family cast and crew ambled onto stage during their fifth consecutive win, it’s pretty obvious how many of the Primetime Emmy awards have become less about recognition than plain expectation. Obviously, the fact a successful series can continue to plumb new depths over multiple years is an advantage of serialised storytelling. But it also makes celebrating it a repetitive, rarely surprising affair.
It’s not even as if most of the wins from this year weren’t warranted. I’d be a total imposter if I tried to shrug off the eminence of Breaking Bad, which concluded at the height of its powers last year. Brutal, offbeat and morally polarising, it quite rightly swept the categories, nabbing Outstanding Drama Series, acting awards for Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Anna Gunn, and a writing win for its masterful climactic episode ‘Ozymandias’.
Like many, I’ve waved the torch for HBO’s True Detective, and as much as I’d banked on a win for Matthew McConaughey’s portrayal of Louisiana’s bleakest policeman, the moment in this year’s ceremony where Jimmy Kimmel jabbed at the Oscar-winner for being too Hollywood-handsome for television seemed to bear far more significance than just a cheeky dig.
To see that sort of infectious, complicated, hysterical perfection snubbed in favour of television’s perennial basic bitch was a bit of a buzzkill.
While more and more networks are leaning towards the anthology/miniseries format, assembling high-calibre vehicles with expensive talent, long-term investment is difficult to beat. Kimmel’s joke seemed to clarify a sentiment this year: cockily swaggering over the finish line with A-list pedigree still can’t compete with those who have put in the hard yards of a marathon, especially when the Academy feel like they’ve contributed to the momentum. Still, a win for Cary Joji Fukunaga’s immaculate direction is a concession I’m OK with.
Defensible positions were much harder to find in the comedy categories. The fact Jim Parsons remains the only credible asset of The Big Bang Theory does not mean he deserves yet another statuette, and while some occasionally witty writing should be noted, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand the enduring allegiance to Modern Family. The fact the Emmys – and culture at large – still seem so utterly smitten with what is essentially a more homogeneous revision of Arrested Development only seems to further underline with every passing year how thoroughly unremarkable it is.
Yes, Julia Louis Dreyfus emerged victorious for stellar work in Veep, but this success still fails to recognise how deeply the greatness of that show relies on the dynamics of its ensemble. One particular moment in the third season (featuring a nosebleed) between Dreyfus and co-star Tony Hale remains this year’s peak for television comedy, and to see that sort of infectious, complicated, hysterical perfection snubbed in favour of television’s perennial basic bitch was a bit of a buzzkill. Louis C.K’s triumph for Writing in Comedy (and with a powerful, vital statement no less) was another comforting concession, but given how many rich, complex works of storytelling seem to characterise the Golden Age of the dramatic categories, it’s dispiriting to see as many generic sitcoms clog up the capital. I mean, it wasn’t even that long ago when Two and a Half Men was still winning shit.
Excluding two unexpected acting triumphs for Sherlock over The Normal Heart, the night continued with very few surprises. I kept recalling the heated Twitter-blowout from the previous year when Jeff Daniels took out the Best Actor category; the win was certainly unwarranted, but at least it was something to talk about.
So the question begs: in light of all this boring, predictable repetition and self-congratulation, why should I care? I know we’re only going to see the same victories, hear the same corny humour, breath the same pensive sigh for Jon Hamm during his umpteenth loss. And the answer: I don’t really care. Neither do you.
In what world is Lorde’s Royals a rock song? Do we really need to watch out for Fifth Harmony? How is Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” not the worst female video of the year?
Like a shiny, swollen balloon, the platform of the awards ceremony has been seeping relevancy for a while. We live in an age where you can saturate yourself with all the critical analysis, wacky hypotheses and sheer hyperbole surrounding a show simply by scrolling a feed. During the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad, every corner of the internet was filled with breathless recaps and wild speculation: if you missed a single week, social media was basically a write-off.
So while it was cool to see it get a few more awards this week, it’s not really a show in any need of further validation – nor has it been since it wrapped up almost a year ago. Even those who didn’t watch along should be well aware of the extent to which that show has penetrated our cultural psyche. An Emmy win now feels more weakly supplementary than anything definitive.
But that’s the nature of this beast, and as Adam and I have previously noted, awards ceremonies are usually as much about pageantry and spectacle as they are about meaningful artistic celebration. The Emmys were always conceived as a public relations opportunity for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and while occasionally there are opportunities presented for important cultural statements, this is really all about sheeny surfaces and pearly grins.
One only had to turn to the MTV Video Music Awards a night earlier to see this model of baffling superfluity taken to the extreme. In what world is Lorde’s ‘Royals’ a rock song? Do we really need to watch out for Fifth Harmony? How is Katy Perry’s ‘Dark Horse’ not the worst female video of the year? Because none of it matters! So let’s all look at this show-stopping Beyoncé medley and these matching denim outfits (throwback!) and Miley Cyrus’ new homeless boyfriend and then go make some memes.
Photo: Unknown
Obviously, MTV is a whole other kind of shameless monster, but it emphasizes the divorce between the celebrity spectacle and the actual creative work that has quickly come to characterise awards ceremonies. The Zeitgeist is a fickle, shape-shifting bastard. Rather than setting our definition of excellence, most of these events linger behind with their thumb on the cultural pulse, only to affirm perceived significance after the fact – sometimes with embarrassingly misguided results. But as long as the stars all attend – like the luminescent Sofia Vergara this year, quite literally placed on a pedestal – you can always assume there’ll be an audience for it.
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