A year ago today, I was up early, watching the announcement of the Emmy Nominations and throwing a little conniption about how stupid the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences continues to be. Well, obviously, not enough nominating members read my blog (shocker! and for shame!) even during what had to be one of the best TV seasons in recent memory.
Thankfully, I was smarter this year. I slept through the nominations. It’s just as easy to have my head explode learning that Will & Grace received 15 nominations (!) at 10 AM as it would have been 90 minutes ago. And actually, I saved myself the aggravation of sitting through the inane, uninformed and often just plain stupid comments of the entertainment “journalists” who crawl out from the cracks in your floorboards, generally to appear on E!
Let’s get back to this for a second though: Will & Grace? Are you fucking kidding me? Doesn’t the Academy know that by sending kudos that show’s way, it only helps to encourage NBC to keep it on the air? And really it is imperative that the 2005-06 season is the last for Will & Grace which has become a painfully uncreative and unfunny show. I used to enjoy the show it’s first two seasons, back when it had interesting storylines and somewhat well-rounded characters; before it descended into nothing but cliche and stereotype, only telling the most obvious jokes and surviving each sweeps period with stunt casting rather than actual writing.
Best Comedy Series? What a joke. How about voting an actually FUNNY show for best comedy series. What about The Simpsons, Family Guy or South Park? Oh no, we can’t nominate them for Best Comedy — they’re animated. Who cares that one episode of either show likely has more laughs than the last two seasons of Will & Grace did combined. Granted, the number of good shows that might qualify as “comedy” is actually a bit of a stretch, and major props for giving Arrested Development (far and away what should be the clear winner!) and Scrubs recognition, but come on. Work a little harder, why don’t you. How about trying to just pretend that you care about being known as a creative ART form rather than simply an instrument of lowest-common-denominator mass-media dreck. Why not do something crazy like notice Reno 911?
The nominations offer no imagination and are actually a perfect indication of what’s wrong with television. The people in charge don’t care about actually watching anything that’s good. It’s more important just to support what’s been around. I think The West Wing had a bit of a resurgence as it closed out the season, but it was still up-and-down all year long as it alternated between individual issue-oriented episodes and the season-long arc relating to the presidential campaign. Personally, I think it should have been disqualified from any awards consideration due the absolutely awful second episode which paid absolutely no attention to the actual relationship between President Bartlett and Leo, then sending the former Chief-of-Staff and presidential best friend out into the wilderness to die like Bambi’s mother with absolutely nobody noticing … only of course, die, he doesn’t. It was an offensive way to treat the character and an absurd departure from storytelling and character consistency, all in order to give the show a little shake-up.
24 had its problems this year as well, and doesn’t deserve to be getting Best Drama Series kudos anymore. Certainly not when you do have the genius of this season’s Veronica Mars (yes genius!), the brilliance of HBO’s The Wire (which never gets any respect from anyone but just about every critic in existence) or the continuously great writing on Gilmore Girls (which could go either way — comedy or drama), to just name a few. And let’s not forget the best family drama of the last several years to never get any respect (and to stupidly be cancelled by NBC after this season), American Dreams.
Sure I’m happy that Desperate Housewives and especially Lost received the recognition they deserved for, in part, changing the fact of broadcast network television this year, but it could hardly be avoided. Everyone was watching these shows, and the Academy has to make sure those people actually watch the kudocast in September. But aside from those shows’ nominations combined with finally splitting the Supporting Actor/Actress awards up, as usual, they didn’t do much else right, and thinking about it any more just gives me a headache.
My TV season in review post is long overdue thanks to the fact that I just finally finished watching 24 earlier this week. I’ll get back to the Emmys later or maybe when they become unavoidable in a couple months. For now, I’m just happy I got some sleep this morning, cause obviously, little of any importance actually went down.
Out of Focus 
Dennis Leary in ‘Rescue Me’ didn’t get nominated for best actor? What a Joke.
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