The trend of the 2014 Primetime Emmy Awards was definitely "the best way to win an Emmy is to already have an Emmy." Just like too many years of the recent past. Some wins were exciting while others were confounding. Some stage bits worked while others did not. I already live blogged the ceremony and now I'm gonna write up even more about the awards as a whole!
It's a great time to be in television. Period. Every few weeks it seems like new territories are being explored and it's just genuinely exciting to see what innovative and elaborate things this medium can create. The Emmy Awards are the celebration of television. And yet, they still just seem like rewarding the lands that have already been explored. The Best Comedy and Drama winners were the same series for two years in a row. It took 47 minutes into the telecast until a first time Emmy winner - Steven Moffat for Sherlock: His Last Vow - was crowned. In fact, so many of the races rewarded actors who have won previously in the same category for the same role and from the same shows. In the drama and comedy fields, the only winners from new series this past year came from Allison Janney for CBS' Mom and Cary Joji Fukunaga for HBO's True Detective. But Janney is a perennial Emmy favorite - having already picked up another trophy earlier this month for her guest appearance on Showtime's Masters of Sex.
Granted some of these repeat wins are completely deserving. "Ozymandias" was hands down the best episode of television from the past year and everyone who submitted it rightfully took home the top prize - including actors Anna Gunn and Bryan Cranston, writer Moira Walley-Beckett and the series itself. Julia Louis-Dreyfuss is giving her best performance in a very impressive and storied career on HBO's Veep. Louis C.K's script for "So Did the Fat Lady" was the best in the Comedy Writing category. The Good Wife was on fire in its fifth season and Julianna Margulies was a huge part of it. All of these people deserved to win because they did astonishing work this past year. The kiss between Cranston and Louis-Dreyfuss was by far the best moment of the night that was simply hysterical.
And then, there are the fields that seem incapable of crowning any new blood. Modern Family has won Best Comedy Series five years in a row. Five years in a row!?!?! That means it is now tied with Frasier as the most-winning comedy in the category. But Modern Family isn't the best comedy on television anymore. Sorry, but that's a fact. New and innovative things are being done elsewhere. You can't honestly tell me that Season 5 of Modern Family was better than Veep's third season or the debut year of Orange Is the New Black. I just don't believe that argument exists. The voters crowned it again for some reason and I don't know why. Ty Burrell won for the second time in the supporting field even though it would have been a much bigger deal if Jesse Tyler Ferguson was the Modern Family actor to prevail.
Like every other year, it's in the Movie and Miniseries categories where the new things are recognized because they kinda have to be. It's not just the same stuff year after year after year. And yet, those issues are still very apparent because of category fraud. What defines a miniseries from a drama or comedy? American Horror Story and Fargo are anthology series set up to run every year while fellow nominees Luther and Treme are ongoing series that just don't fulfill the episodic requirements to be seen as a drama.
Fargo and The Normal Heart rightfully pull off wins as Best Miniseries and TV Movie respectively. But these categories aren't without their major upsets. The one win that just irks me the most is Kathy Bates from American Horror Story: Coven triumphing over Fargo's Allison Tolman. What Tolman did this year was so specific and distinct and breathtaking. It was the performance that deserved to win based solely on the tape. And voters do judge some of these races by the individual tapes. But instead, Bates wins because she is an Emmy favorite - who honestly just needed a win for something other than Two and a Half Men. That just seemed wrong.
Additional strangeness was all of the support for Sherlock. They're able to submit one episode as a movie which I don't honestly support at all. From what I've heard from my critic fans whom I trust, that one episode wasn't even the best the show could be. And yet, Steven Moffat won, Martin Freeman won and Benedict Cumberbatch won. It truly seemed like it could stage an upset from the much beloved HBO film The Normal Heart which has this grand history attached to it that would 100 percent lead to a heartwarming speech no matter who won. That ultimately did occur but it was odd seeing such unified support for Sherlock.
The awards ceremony itself was briskly paced. It actually ended right on time which almost never happens with these awards show. Seth Meyers was unmemorable in his opening monologue. I couldn't even tell you one of his jokes without reading over my live-blog of the event. He got much better afterwards - with the Billy on the Street, questions from the audience and Weird Al Yankovic bits all working extremely well.
But how on earth were the Emmy producers so capable of putting together such an honorable and beautiful tribute to the late Robin Williams - which was gorgeously delivered by co-star and friend Billy Crystal - so completely tone deaf when it came to the bit of putting Sofia Vergara on a rotating display. There are so many great roles for women out there. And this industry can become sexist just like that. It was abhorrent.
And lastly people kept commenting on how strong the quality is in television right now but two seconds later there would be jokes about why Matthew McConoughey and Julia Roberts would be in attendance at this event. They are movie stars and simply put: the show itself was star struck by them. Nothing explains this point better than a clip of Roberts work in The Normal Heart being seen before a commercial and her being just as baffled as to why it was being shown as the rest of us. They were so certain McConoughey would walk away with the Oscar and the Emmy in the same year, that they were all set to have Roberts bestow the award onto him. Instead, all of these movie stars were shut out. McConoughey didn't win. Roberts didn't win. Jodie Foster didn't win. Billy Bob Thornton didn't win. It's exceptional to have all this great talent working in TV. But their names aren't enough to just hand them an award despite how big a deal everyone seemed to make of their presence tonight.
