The Three Strike Rule: Emmy Award Nominees!
Monday, July 21st, 2008 by Scott MalchusLast week, this year’s Emmy Award nominees were announced with AMC’s drama, Mad Men, coming away with more nominations than any other show. What a pleasant surprise, since AMC is a little-watched network — and also because the first season of Mad Men was one of the most remarkable shows on television, not only for 2007, but in the past decade. Whether the series is able to sustain its quality will be answered in the coming months when its second season begins (the season 2 premiere is next Sunday, 7/27). Still, I shouldn’t be all that surprised that Mad Men and FX’s Damages both received a fare share of nominations. This isn’t a knock against either show (I also thoroughly enjoyed Damages), but both were created by people who worked on perennial Emmy darling The Sopranos. The Emmys have always had a tendency to throw their hats with their favorite sons and daughters — how the hell else can you explain Boston Legal and Monk getting nominated yet again? Boston Legal is well written, true, but is it better than Friday Night Lights? Hardly. And Monk barely has the laughs of My Boys or How I Met Your Mother. Yet it seems that every year Tony Shaloub, William Shatner and James Spader are nominated, along with their shows.
The truth is there is too much television to watch (as the 1,000 Emmy award categories indicate). I wager to say that you could find at least one show on any of the hundreds of channels available to keep your interest for an hour once a week. But the nominating committees aren’t responsible for watching every episode of a series to make their final call — that would be next to impossible. Instead, these judges see a couple of select episodes that highlight a particular writer or certain actors. Thus, the Best Series award isn’t really about how a show progressed (or went downhill) over the course of a season, or how well an actor made his character three-dimensional through 13 or 22 episodes. Is that fair? I say no. I say that if a show is going to be nominated for best series, the committee should be required to watch every single one. It’s sad that judges aren’t even willing to spend a short time in the hardcore world of The Wire or the naturalistic Texan life in Friday Night Lights, as evidenced by the lack of nominations for both exemplary programs.
In the end, I’m not sure if the Emmy awards mean much to anyone outside of the immediate television industry. The awards ceremony isn’t even broadcast live in Los Angeles, where all the networks reside. Unlike the Oscars, Tony Awards and Grammys, an Emmy win doesn’t necessarily boost the popularity of a winning series — just ask the producers of Arrested Development. (more…)
Popularity: 5% [?]



sit•com n. Informal
Beginning with last fall’s Season-Three closer, however, Weeds has audaciously – and, so far at least, disastrously – loosed itself from its sitcom moorings. Creator Jenji Kohan didn’t just shift the show’s setting; she burned the motherfucker down, destroying all of Agrestic’s “Little Boxes” in an inferno neatly tied to last year’s horrific California wildfires. Unfortunately, while most of the major characters survived the blaze, Kohan and the show’s writers seem to have left the funny behind along with the “MILFweed” in Nancy’s growhouse; as a result, Weeds has gone sadly (and with all apologies to Cheech & Chong) up in smoke.
Elvis Mitchell is one of the preeminent film critics and interviewers of our generation. Since 1996 his NPR radio show,
There’s Grant Show, who already made the ’90s safe for promiscuity on Melrose Place, as an airline pilot intent on bringing the Mile High Club down to earth. There’s Jack Davenport, the onetime backbone of the awesome British sex-romp Coupling who wasn’t much of a swordsman (ahem) in the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, as a family man struggling with the sexual revolution and his American accent.
I was supposed to write a column about several reality shows airing this summer, and I had good intentions of doing just that. But the only reality I know right now is that I’m an addict … to Lost. I must find out what happens to the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, which departed Sydney, Australia, for Los Angeles, California, on September 24, 2004, and crashed on an uncharted island.
Katie Couric is sexy. I’ll give you all a moment to digest that.
The Bill Engvall Show is the more traditional of the two sitcoms, and by traditional, I mean there’s nothing new here.
I must admit that I turned off My Boys during its inaugural season.
USA Network’s latest in a successful slate of summertime programs is In Plain Sight (premiering 6/1/08 and airing Sundays, 10 PM). The series stars Mary McCormack as Mary Shannon, a federal marshal for the Federal Witness Protection Program. The show takes place primarily in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area, where Shannon is based. McCormack is a fine actress whose most visible role is still that of Alison Stern, the wife to Howard Stern in the 1997 film, Private Parts. Since then, she has appeared in a number of indie movies, as well as excellent supporting roles in such television series like Murder One, The West Wing, ER, K-Street and the exceptional 2004 USA Network mini-series, Traffic. It’s great to see McCormack the lead in a series that blends comedy, drama and mystery; she makes the show worth checking out.
So here we are at the end of another cycle of Fox’s juggernaut, American Idol.
This past Thursday NBC unceremoniously said goodbye to the medical sitcom Scrubs after seven seasons.
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