EMMY DAZE
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EMMY DAZE interview from WILDsound radio with Daren on Monday August 4 2008 about this column
EMMY DAZE
By Daren Foster
As award shows go, the Emmys register on the interest scale somewhere around the Grammys but a notch or two above the CMAs. The execrable Daytime Emmys are the only thing that lends its primetime cohorts any hint of substance at all. (Has Susan Lucci finally won that acting award? Is Susan Lucci still acting? Is she even still alive?) In a word, a Tony Soprano word in fact, I could give a fuck about the Emmy awards. Normally.
But this year, I will admit, when the nominations were announced, I sat up and took notice and surprisingly enough, I looked at the list that had been created and was pleased with it. Why? Because once more, with one last opportunity to right years of egregious wrongs, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences saw fit to dole out yet another snub of The Wire, thereby giving me yet another opportunity to write about the show.
Yes gentle reader(s), just when you thought it was safe to click on this post without fear of being beaten over the head with my proselytizing, here I go again, relentless in my drive to ensure that no stone is left unturned in finding converts. I will not stop until every home in every nation the world over has at least one copy of every season of The Wire in their DVD library. Maybe even one copy for every TV in every home in every nation the world over. At which point in time, the voice of the people will rise up in unison, calling out for the purveyors of pap, schmaltz and idiocy to stop polluting the airwaves and to start delivering unto us quality television that befits our discerning tastes and enlightened sensibilities.
It’s to be expected that when any award nominations are announced, the inevitably disbelieving outcry of What Were They Thinking?! from a vocal group of interested onlookers will follow. That’s most of the fun with these things. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.
This rebuff of The Wire, however, seems almost pathological in both its regularity and absolute obliviousness to the level of the show’s acknowledged excellence. It’s hard, in fact, not to imagine that the omission isn’t intentional. Perhaps the Academy is afraid to shine a brighter light on The Wire lest it generate for the show a wider audience who will realize just how bad other programs on the air actually are.
Hold on, hold on, those of you still following along with yet another column on The Wire will counter: didn’t Emmy voters heap awards on shows like The Sopranos and Arrested Development? Aren’t nominations routinely handed out to the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? No doubt, no doubt. The Sopranos had a certain popular cache that made it easy to embrace. It is my belief that Arrested Development won its one Best Comedy Emmy merely because Academy voters tried to erase the memory of giving the award to Everybody Loves Raymond the year before only to forget again the following year. I fully expect a similar mistake with the oft-nominated Two and a Half Men. (Do you think Charlie Sheen’s regular appearance on the nominees’ list has something to do with the old and doddery, the perpetually soused or largely disinterested mistaking him for his dad, Martin, and believing they’re voting for The West Wing?)
What’s particularly galling about this year’s slew of nominees in the Outstanding Drama Series category is that rather than the usual list of five programs, there are six, suggesting such an explosion of quality that made it difficult to narrow the field down to just the regular number. And still, The Wire failed to make the cut, pushed aside by such fare as the long lost Lost, the bizarrely loved House and Boston Legal.
Sure, history was made when a couple basic cable shows, Mad Men and Damages, were announced and Dexter is suitably subversive to give the category a certain edge. Damages was certainly fun and engaging although I have no idea where they could possibly go in a second season. As a late-comer still embroiled in the first season of Mad Men, I will say that it is certainly shaping up to be a stunningly good series.
That’s three. Boston Legal?! In the immortal words of Gob Bluth: I mean, come on!!
I tread on delicate terrain here as my late father, may he rest in peace, loved Boston Legal. Family legend has it that on his death bed, which I couldn’t be at due to a previously scheduled outing to Casino Rama to see Hall & Oates (how often does that opportunity arise these days? I mean, come on!!), my father, more deluded than usual, believed himself to be Denny Crane. His last words, I have it on good authority, were: I’m Denny Crane! Not one to speak ill of the dead or, at least, the dead who sired me, I still can’t help thinking that maybe, just maybe, that particular nomination is some kind of industry in-joke to make the other nominees seem that much better.
How else to explain it? As the culmination of the dubiously suspect career of David E. Kelley, Boston Legal represents almost everything I loathe in network television except it doesn’t star Charlie Sheen. Before the advent of cable television as a competing creative entity, Kelley’s shows (Picket Fences… I can’t even be bothered to run down the list of shite that followed) seemed dangerously quirky, hip, and edgy. These days, the quirks are all forced and the hip edginess comes across as stodgy, like the uncool guy working hard to seem cool. Forgive me, dad. It had to be said. Maybe we all would’ve been happier if someone had told you that while you were still alive.
For Boston Legal, the laughably named Academy of Television Arts and Sciences slotted in an additional nominee but not for The Wire? The Peabody award winning, The Wire. What does this say about those involved enough in the American television industry to be able to cast a ballot in the Emmy proceedings? Having used up my quota of swear words already this week, I can only think that a majority of these people must be full of self-loathing for the work they do.
Realizing the great harm they inflict on the viewing public with their substandard product, they lavish awards on themselves in an effort to mollify the gaping emptiness they carry around inside.This may be giving them much more credit than they deserve suggesting any still have a conscience to speak of. Being lazy and ill-informed are probably more apt explanations. Formulaic crap is easy to churn out; in at 9, home at 5. A little latitude to this accepted way of doing things will be tolerated but certainly not encouraged. If we applaud everyone who goes out of their way to treat the audience with too much respect and a genuine regard for their ability to watch and follow 3 dimensional characters and complicated storylines, people will start to expect that every time they turn on the television. We’d all have to start working harder and that’s just too much to bear. I mean, come on!!
READ MORE COLUMNS BY DAREN FOSTER
August 4 2008 - ME TALK GOOD
July 28 2008 - TAKE THE CANNOLI
July 21 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 2
July 14 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 1
July 7 2008 - THE INDIGESTIBLE HULK
June 30 2008 - KING GEORGE
June 23 2008 - PLAYING ONE ON TV
June 16 2008 - NEW MONDAY MORNING COLUMN - LIFE IS TOO SHORT - Finally, I saw the last episode of The Wire.
June 4 2008 - FLIP THIS CHANNEL - Buying first house leads to having many things on the mind.
May 29 2008 - BE AFRAID VERY AFRAID - The Canadian military is no longer some namby-pamby, truce-brokering, do-gooding, adventure-seeking, peacekeeping bunch of pacifiers
May 22 2008 - STONE COLD BORING ANGEL - All about The Stone Angel
May 15 2008 - HARD TO SWALLOW CANDY - Madonna is back!
May 8 2008 - THE DUMBEST GUYS IN THE ROOM
May 1 2008 - AN ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT
April 24 2008 - Just TWEEN you and me
April 17 2008 - A Day at the Movies
April 10 2008 - Stop the (March) Madness!
April 3 2008 - Heaven's Gate Revisited
March 27 2008 - ACTING OUT - A great actor working with sub-par material
March 20 2008 - TECHNO ROBBER BARONS - When daylight savings time ruins my taping of The Wire
March 13 2008 - DAMN AGES - Growing up is hard to do
March 6 2008 - CULT OF SADNESS PART 2 - How tearjerkers still baffle me!
February 28 2008 - CULT OF SADNESS - How tearjerkers baffle me!
February 21 2008 - SOME TV SHOULD STAY STRUCK - post strike TV now!
February 14 2008 - DOCS MUST ROCK - Documentary Films 
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