Chris Pizzello/Associated Press
Actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Brad Garrett announce nominees for August’s Emmy Awards. TV critics say the Emmy voting system stinks more than it did before it was “fixed.”
MAKING ENEMMYS: Last week’s Emmy nominations, the first after a “fix” to the nomination process that was supposed to revive the awards, have produced an almost unanimous reaction, equivalent to scorn, outrage, ridicule and dismay rolled up into a big ball of calumny and vituperation.
It’s fair to say the tone was summed up by this paragraph by Tim Goodman, the TV critic for the San Francisco Chronicle:
“Inconceivably, not only did great series and worthy actors from across the spectrum get largely ignored by the new fix,” Goodman wrote on Friday, “Emmy voters put a blindfold over their vision thing and actually regressed. The result, even when factoring in that Emmy voters are traditionally clueless and about a year behind what’s actually happening, quality-wise on your television, is a staggering lameness.”
Goodman’s disappointment was echoed all over the TV press. “They must not like us,” wrote Melanie McFarland of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Or, at the very least, they don’t watch and value television in the same way that viewers do.”
“Like reanimated corpses clawing out of their graves to walk the Earth as zombies,” wrote Glenn Garvin of the Miami Herald, “dead television shows lurched to the forefront of the Emmy nominees announced Thursday, with canceled programs dominating the most coveted acting awards.
“After working so hard six years ago to make the process more democratic,” wrote Alan Sepinwall of the New Jersey Star-Ledger, “the Academy handed all the power back to the same self-selecting, star-struck bunch who made the Emmys irrelevant by the end of the ’90s. You have to admire organizational stupidity like that.”
“Two words sum up what I think about this new Emmy systems and the results it produced,” wrote Knoxville News TV columnist Terry Morrow on his blog. “Kevin James.” The star of King Of Queens got a nomination for best actor in a comedy, while Two And A Half Men, currently the most popular sitcom on the small screen, got an unprecedented seven nominations — a record scoop for a show that’s about as funny as cranioscopy.
“Maybe we improved,” show creator Chuck Lorre giddily told the Hollywood Reporter. “Maybe we made the right submission. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter. You can’t overanalyze what got you nominated or what didn’t. It’s out of your control.”
To be frank, I saw about as much funny on the Emmy nomination list as pork at Passover. When I want funny these days, I stand a better chance looking around YouTube.com, where some comic genius has married the laugh track from Lucky Louie to an episode of Deadwood.
Just go the YouTube.com and type “Deadwood” and “Lucky Louie” into the search window. Then turn off your computer and TV, go outside and enjoy the weather.
