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by D.W. O'Dell
I’m a very constructive guy. I hate to point out problems if I can’t at least take a stab at solving them. But there is a problem with the Emmy Awards that recurs year after year, and I have no idea how to solve it.
The problem is best exemplified this year by Tony Shaloub’s victory for Best Actor in a Comedy, for Monk. Shaloub’s portrayal of the “defective detective” is brilliant, a sublime combination of slapstick timing and extraordinary pathos. It is the inverse of Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of House; we admire House despite his being a bastard, while we admire Monk despite the fact that he is pathetic.
(By the way, a quick show of hands of everyone who predicted that the guy who played the cab driver would have the most successful career once Wings folded up shop. Yeah, I thought so — not many hands up out there. And the second most successful actor is the guy who played Lowell, who managed to get nominated for an Oscar. Way to go, Tim Daly, Steven Weber and Crystal Bernard.)
At the 2006 Emmy Awards Shaloub picked up his third Emmy, beating out the heavily favored Steve Carell of The Office. Shaloub may have deserved the award, given the quality of his performance, but the problem is that it’s essentially the same performance he’s won for twice before. The Emmies have always had the same problem that affects modern politics: incumbents have too much advantage.
Do the Emmies need term limits? Should Emmy winners be disqualified from being nominated the next season? Or even permanently? That hardly seems fair because sometimes actors do incredibly high caliber work season in and season out. Maybe the Best Actor in 2006 will also be the Best Actor in 2007.
Some actors limit their number of wins due to excessive modesty. Both Candace Bergen and John Larroquette stopped submitting their names for nomination after they won an embarrassingly large number of awards (five for Bergen, four for Larroquette). Nice, but one suspects that any system that relies on the modesty of actors is seriously flawed.
The Emmies should also be suspicious of any changes in their format. After all, the adoption of the “Lauren Graham nomination procedures” resulted in a nomination for Ellen Burstyn for a fourteen-second performance as “ex-lover #3,” but no nomination for Hugh Laurie, James Gandolfini, Lost, or (ironically) Lauren Graham.
I have no solution. Maybe it is entirely fair that, for example, Kelsey Grammer be nominated year after year for playing Frasier Crane; after all he had twenty years to perfect the character. Maybe worrying about the fairness of an awards program is akin to worrying about the quality of refereeing at a professional wrestling match. Okay, that’s the solution: I’ll stop worrying about the Emmies and focus instead on global warming. That’s something I may be able to do something about.
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