Opinion

Emmy show will go down in history -- for all the wrong reasons

Friday, September 26, 2008

Steve Martin presented his former boss Tommy Smothers with a long overdue writing Emmy last Sunday night, prefacing the award with his typically droll comments, spiced with flashes of his absurdist humor. Martin may have had my favorite line of the night; when talking about how excited he was about being at the ceremony, he said that it fulfilled a childhood dream for him. "I would rush home from school, get dressed up, and play '60th Annual Emmy Awards,'" Martin deadpanned.

Somehow, I think his version would have been better.

From the black hole of funny that was the "we've got nothing" opening sketch (which I initially thought was due to a technical glitch -- but no, turns out it was just a terminal case of hubris), to the graceless "Laugh-In" cast reunion, to the misbegotten attempts to recreate some of TV's most well-known settings, to the shared malaise that everyone who hit the stage or had a seat in the auditorium seemed to share, the 60th Primetime Emmy Awards presentation was a shapeless, formless blob of TV programming -- something that felt disorganized to the point of seeming slapped together at the last minute. This year's show ought to go down in the annals of the business; an example of how not to do these sorts of things.

The cleverness of having a quintet of nominees hosting should have killed the idea right off the bat. I can just hear the pitch in the Emmy telecast producer's office: "Hey, I've got the hook for a milestone year! Instead of picking one host, let's have the five nominees for Reality Show Host emcee. They handle their duties with varying degrees of efficacy, and only two of them do their shows live on a regular basis, and the combination will likely produce titanic (and obvious) on-and-off-stage ego clashes, sure, but it's an attention-grabber!"

"What about the awkward patter, or the long stretches of rambling, or the dead, dead air?" someone may have argued.

Mr. Idea probably retorted, "It's an awards show -- what else would you expect?"

How about something -- anything -- else?

Maybe I'm expecting too much, but shouldn't any industry's internationally-televised tribute to itself be better than this -- especially when television is the industry?

Meanwhile, reviews around the dial:

Back to the scrap heap -- I liked the original "Knight Rider," the 1980s adventure that introduced Germany to David Hasselhoff. The show itself was catnip to the average 12 year-old boy -- an action series with a talking Trans Am at its center. But even the average 12 year-old boy saw through the weak-soup premise, if not right away, then at least by the time the hero became an amnesiac, or the car (the Knight Industries Two Thousand, a/k/a KITT) became an amnesiac, or they introduced an evil twin for the hero, or they introduced an evil twin for the car (the Knight Automated Roving Robot -- KARR, get it?). The show was lightweight to be sure, but it was fun. Then it ended, was missed (at least by me) for about a month, and evaporated from brains throughout America.

So while I wasn't enthused when I heard about NBC's reworking of the concept, I was curious for nostalgic reasons. My nostalgia faded after witnessing the lackluster-at-best two-hour movie that aired to decent ratings in the spring.

However, the all-new "Knight Rider," which airs -- for now -- Wednesdays at 7 p.m. on NBC, doesn't even hit the quote-unquote highs of the movie from a few months ago. It's -- in fact -- anti-entertainment: not fun, not exciting, not even worthy of being called "so-bad-it's-good." Frankly, it sullies the good name of the original series -- for whatever that's worth. Half a star (out of four).

I had a flat reaction to the "Fringe" pilot (Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on Fox); I liked the performances, the show had a great look to it, but the storytelling just didn't grab me. It felt like the show's engine wasn't running on all cylinders, and that was holding back the whole enterprise. Unfortunately, I have to say that after a few episodes, my opinion hasn't changed. The show has yet to start percolating in the way that previous J.J. Abrams series "Alias" and "Lost" did at the same time in their runs, and while I still hold out hope that "Fringe" could begin breaking through storywise, that light's getting dimmer by the week. Two and a half stars.

On the other side of the genre TV coin, last week's "Supernatural" premiere (Thursdays at 8 p.m. on The CW) was tense, funny, and very entertaining. This is a show that I admit wasn't really on my radar for the first couple of seasons, but it's quickly become a "can't miss" kind of show for me. Three and a half stars.

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  • Your a more gutsy person than I. I quit watching Emmy twenty years ago. Good Grief, am I that old?

    The 'humor' offered in the 80's killed my appreciation.

    -- Posted by Navyblue on Fri, Sep 26, 2008, at 4:58 PM
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