Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
The list of Emmy nominees comes out this week. Will TV's best be on it?
Jul 19, 1999 | In the wee hours Thursday, the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences will announce its 1999 Emmy award nominations, and I think I speak for many viewers when I say, Big whoop. Over the past few years, some of TV's most deserving shows have inexplicably failed to even register on the academy's radar ("Buffy"? "Everybody Loves Raymond"? "Homicide"?). So, excuse me, but it's difficult to get all tingly at the prospect of turning on the Emmy telecast (Sept. 12, Fox) and watching "Frasier" and Dennis Franz feel the love of their peers, again.
But, still ... What if this were the year the Emmy nominations were really based on merit, not popularity, snobbery or inertia? Hey, it could happen! Several reliable nominees from years past, like "Seinfeld," "The Larry Sanders Show" and "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," are no more. Slots are up for grabs. If ever there was a time for Emmy voters to make that great leap into the present, it's now.
To help the academy along, I've compiled my own list of fantasy-league Emmy nominees. But I'm making some major rule changes. First and foremost, I'm instituting term limits for Emmy nominees. Under this new rule, which shall be known as the Candice Bergen Statute, once a performer wins two Emmys for the same role, said performer is automatically enshrined in the Hall of Fame and ineligible for further nominations in that role. This rule would erase the high dij` vu factor that makes the Emmy telecast such a yawn. I mean, would you watch the Academy Awards if you knew that Gwyneth Paltrow was going to keep winning that Oscar for "Shakespeare in Love" for the next four years? No! So what makes the TV Academy think we want to see Dennis Franz (three), Helen Hunt (three), Kelsey Grammer (three) or Candice Bergen (five) hogging all the hardware? Give it up!
Series, however, would be exempt from term limits. Unlike performances, which tend not to vary greatly from season to season, wonderful shows can easily have terrible years, due to cast changes, bad plot decisions and mass cases of writer's block. A series is a living, breathing, evolving thing, as anybody who suffered through the "Seinfeld" slump of '94 can tell you.
My other big rules change would be to nominate prime-time animated sitcoms -- yes, cartoons -- in the best comedy series category, where they should have been all along (they're currently segregated in an animation category). Last season, there were more animated series in prime-time than ever before -- Fox has built entire nights around non-human sitcoms -- and the 'toons deserve some respect. There was a live action sitcom drought in 1998-99, and it's going to show up in the Emmy nominations, I betcha, with shaky efforts like "Sports Night" or "Just Shoot Me" dragged in to fill up slots that should rightfully belong to "The Simpsons" and "King of the Hill."
Of course, once you start nominating cartoons in the best comedy series category, you've created a whole other problem: Where do you nominate the voice actors? I've thought long and hard about this and I have to say -- beats me. On the one hand, Kathy Najimy's voice-only Peggy Hill on "King of the Hill" is a fascinating and fleshed-out performance (much more so than her live-action work as Olive on "Veronica's Closet"). So shouldn't she be nominated with the other comedy actresses? But, then, what do you do with Pamela Segall, the woman who voice-acts the part of the most exquisitely strange adolescent boy on TV, Bobby Hill from "King of the Hill"? Would you nominate her for best supporting actress, even though her character is male? You see how tricky this is?
So here's a compromise suggestion. The animated sitcoms get nominated in the regular best comedy series category (and in the comedy writing and directing categories), but the voice actors are nominated in their own voice actor categories. It's not perfect, but, hey, if you don't like it, get your own fantasy.
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