Last 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…)
Elvis Mitchell is one of the preeminent film critics and interviewers of our generation. Since 1996 his NPR radio show, 
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.
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.
Watching Tom Cruise appear on Oprah last week, I was surprised at how authentic he appeared.
Mention the words “silent movie” and most people will become glassy-eyed or chuckle some comment like “You know they make movies with sound now, don’t you?” It’s not that these people are elitist or snobs about movies. It’s just that the average moviegoer has only seen the occasional silent-film clip that makes it look like people in the early 20th century moved at a very fast pace (films in the silent era were shot at a different speed than modern films), or they expect to hear clunky piano music playing over slapstick-comedy one-reelers. Most people are unfamiliar with the history of motion pictures and fail to realize that many of the techniques we see in films today were originally incubated during that time; they don’t realize that while there were films made for the masses, there were also grand epics shown in glamorous movie palaces with live orchestras accompanying the wonderful images flickering on the screen.
Brothers & Sisters, ABC’s latest hit family drama (Sundays at 10 pm), came back to the airwaves last night, and for some of us, it was a welcome return of quality television. It is rare that an adult drama like this one has managed to remain all-inclusive of its male and female characters.