Sunday night’s Emmy Awards broadcast offers dedicated television viewers a chance to see television’s biggest stars. On television.
While this may seem as noteworthy as an ex-con running a Tilt-a-Whirl, TV types think enough of the Emmys to rent
tuxedos and cajole gowns out of designers, signs of big doings in slovenly times.
Preening Paul Reiser, of NBC’s “Mad About You,” will host the dispensing of TV’s highest honors (7 p.m., WLS-Ch. 7), and Oprah Winfrey and Michael J. Fox are listed as his “assistants,” a phrase that suggests Winfrey will spend Sunday afternoon screening Reiser’s phone calls while Fox sees to it that the star’s Italian loafers are buffed to a high gloss and he has Pellegrino, not Evian, in the dressing room.
Beyond that, rest assured that the program will keep you on the edge of your seat, if you first put about five pillows between you and the seat back. Awards shows, as has been well documented, are prime time’s answer to televised golf.
People still get worked up about the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Emmys, though: TV people because they’re insecure egomaniacs who thrive on any recognition, no matter how illogical, as proof of their great genius; and the public because, you know, arguing about what’s best is kind of fun.
A good motto for readers to bear in mind as they approach the Emmys is, Never Trust a Critic Who Gets Too Excited
About Predicting Awards in His Field. To try to anticipate the taste or logic of the kinds of people who vote on these things, after all, is to indulge in an exercise only slightly more meaningful than a schnauzer working on his short game.
But here in our own laboratory of the television arts and sciences, we developed last year a method for picking Emmy winners that (A) retains the necessary critical detachment; (B) is nearly as random as seems the awards process itself; and (C) is good practice for an English pub crawl.
Members of the accounting department who raised eyebrows about a certain $9.99 expense-account item, take note. It is time to dust off, and further amortize the cost of, the Emmy-anticipatying dart board.
In its inaugural, 1995 usage, the Pinpoint Prognostication Method (trademark applied for) accurately foresaw exactly zero winners in 10 categories, or two fewer than random guessing should have produced.
Applying the R&D standards of many businesses, these results would land the PPM in the same scrapheap as home Betamax machines and the four-button remote control. But the world has few enough traditions as it is, and even fewer that allow one to get paid for hurling dangerous implements through office airspace.
The methodology is simple: One category at a time, the dart board is papered with five Post-It notes printed on their backsides with the names of the five nominees in each of 10 marquee categories.
This writer, at a distance of about 25 feet, tosses cheap darts toward the board. The first dart to hit one of the slips–as opposed to the cabinetry, the trusty 27-inch Sony, or the pink lawn flamingo sent by a television network trying to promote a nature documentary–amounts to a prediction.
After 10 rounds of making co-workers nervous, the 1996 Emmy picks were in.
Supporting Actor, Drama: Our dart here proved a sentimentalist. It bypassed Hector Elizondo of “Chicago Hope,” James McDaniel of “NYPD Blue,” Stanley Tucci of “Murder One” and Noah Wyle of “ER” to settle on last year’s Emmy winner, veteran character actor Ray Walston, for his work in the last season of “Picket Fences.”
Supporting Actress, Drama: The selecting dart went with a controversial choice, Tyne Daly of “Christy,” a series that had only a brief run on television last season, and on cable’s Family Channel at that. The dart preferred Daly’s work on the “Waltons”-like series to that of Barbara Bosson in “Murder One,” Sharon Lawrence and Gail O’Grady in “NYPD Blue” and last year’s winner, Julianna Margulies in “ER.”
Supporting Actor, Comedy: Observers of the process thought the darts would make easy work of this category, choosing David Hyde Pierce of “Frasier” both because he won last year and because of his dart-friendly last name. Instead, though, nine darts in a row were unable to make a decision before the 10th tabbed–in a decision that in retrospect couldn’t be more obvious–Rip Torn for his sublime work in HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show.” Joining Hyde Pierce in being snubbed by the inanimate object were Jason Alexander and Michael Richards (“Seinfeld”) and Jeffrey Tambor (“Larry Sanders”).
Supporting Actress, Comedy: Who else but Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Elaine of TV’s most popular comedy, “Seinfeld”? One theory holds that the dart tabbed her because of her character’s affinity for punching other characters, a very dart-like behavior. Also-acteds: Christine Baranski of “Cybill” (who won last year), Janeane Garofalo of “Larry Sanders,” Jayne Meadows of the short-lived “High Society” and Renee Taylor of “The Nanny.”
Lead Actor, Drama: This, too, was a difficult decision. Facing a field of George Clooney and Anthony Edwards (“ER”), Dennis Franz and Jimmy Smits (“NYPD Blue”), and, for the first time, Andre Braugher (“Homicide”), nine darts in a row again failed to render a prediction. One can only assume that they were torn between the belief that Braugher, long overlooked, deserved it, and that Clooney or Edwards, of TV’s most popular series, were likely to win. The 10th dart went with Clooney.
Lead Actress, Drama: Here, the darts went with popular, and quickly. The first dart thrown, a high, arcing toss, penetrated the paper bearing the name of Sherry Stringfield, who had to give up custody of her niece on “ER” this year, a piercing psychological blow. Left on the board unscathed: Gillian Anderson of “The X-Files”; Kathy Baker of “Picket Fences”; Christine Lahti of “Chicago Hope”; and Angela Lansbury, again, on the now-departed “Murder, She Wrote.”
Lead Actor, Comedy: A highly competitive category, featuring multiple winner Kelsey Grammer of “Frasier,” the underappreciated Garry Shandling of “Larry Sanders,” Jerry Seinfeld of “Seinfeld,” and the Emmy host himself, Reiser of “Mad About You.” Despite the stiff competition, the dart didn’t hesitate in selecting a newcomer to series TV, but certainly not to acting: John Lithgow for his delightfully deadpan portrayal of an alien on Earth in “3rd Rock From the Sun.”
Lead Actress, Comedy: The choice made was a no-brainer, entirely appropriate for an item lacking cognition. Helen Hunt, delightful in “Mad About You,” successful in the big-screen “Twister,” got the dart’s nod. But the flight path may prove controversial, should any of the other nominated actresses get wind of it. The predicting dart actually bounced first off of the boom box that sits atop the TV set before perforating the Hunt Post-It. Not blessed by a lucky bounce were Ellen DeGeneres (“Ellen”), Fran Drescher (“The Nanny”), Patricia Richardson (“Home Improvement”) and Cybill Shepherd (“Cybill”).
Drama Series: Here’s where this year’s two most nominated series, the dueling Chicago hospital dramas “ER” and “Chicago Hope,” do battle. Here, too, is where two fine and oft-nominated criminal-justice series are up again, “NYPD Blue” and “Law & Order.” But the dart either struck a blow for moving on from those tired old genres, or showed an embarrassing predeliction for speculation about the supernatural. It predicted “The X-Files.”
Comedy Series: Furious that “The Simpsons,” once again, was not nominated (this was demonstrated when one seemingly errant dart in this round came close to striking the office’s cutout mask of Mr. Burns), the dart bypassed every nominated network TV comedy: “Mad About You,” “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “Frasier.” Its choice, in all likelihood for the penetrating insight and sharp-pointed humor about the television business: “The Larry Sanders Show.”
