Critic’s Notebook: A Flat Nate Bargatze and a Lame Time-Saving Gag Upstage Worthy Winners at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards

Given that I live in Los Angeles and work for an entertainment industry trade publication, I’m not supposed to admit this, but much of the country — not “most” but probably more than “some” — has a particular perception about Hollywood.

Writers and directors and producers and movie stars, you sometimes hear, live in a liberal bubble and emerge only for the occasional awards show — galas dedicated to famous people patting themselves on the collective butt, espousing left-wing talking points and generally ignoring the possibility that the whole industry is having a corrosive effect on society, especially young people.

Very few minds are likely to have been changed by Sunday night’s 77th Primetime Emmy Awards, at which host Nate Bargatze threw down a challenge at the top of the show: Bargatze announced he was donating $100,000 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, but that any speeches pushing longer than 45 seconds would cause that pot to diminish. Shorter speeches could restore some of that money.

For perhaps the first half of the telecast, winners were sheepish about going long, especially those who had to watch the dollar figure plummeting on a screen behind them as they thanked their agents or expelled overwhelmed breath. At a certain point, though, most of the winners stopped caring, and when even Dan Gilroy, one of the writers on Andor, found it more important to praise Bob Iger than be conscientious about time and the welfare of children — a pretty direct subversion of every revolutionary theme espoused by Andor — it was clear nobody was caring anymore.

By the end, the telecast had gone deeply into the red for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. There was never a legitimate concern that the show was going to conclude with the existential crisis of Seth Rogen, Stephen Graham, Noah Wyle and John Oliver — winners of an astonishing percentage of the night’s trophies — sending small children to a work camp to repay their debt to Bargatze.

Instead, it was left to CBS, a network perceived as turning over its ideological keys to Donald Trump, to donate $100,000 and Bargatze, a compulsively wholesome comic from Tennessee, to donate $250,000. So the Boys & Girls Clubs of America ended up big winners on Sunday, thanks to a network eager to befriend the administration and to a Red State comic — and no thanks to the Hollywood elite.

Was that a narrative the producers or CBS or Bargatze (not a political comic in ANY way) intended to build the show around, or just what happened? Hard to tell, but if you asked me to summarize the plot of Sunday’s Emmys, that’s the plot.

Or, rather, that’s a plot. Or a theme? Never have I been as thoroughly conscious of how many masters an Emmys telecast must serve. The show has to function as a promotional platform for the network airing it, an increasing challenge in a landscape where only broadcast networks are airing the Emmys (for now), even as the Emmys largely ignore the broadcast networks. The show has to function as a representation of the Television Academy and of the state of the medium. The show has to function as a party for the people in attendance, since that’s what the show is there for. And the show has to function as a piece of entertainment for the viewers tuning in at home. And that’s without getting into whatever global or national issues the various participants want to bring into the conversation.

Let it never be said that Bargatze and the producers didn’t have a tough job, made even tougher by the precariously polarized nature of our country, perhaps more this week than ever before. They failed! Completely! But I’m not really sure what success would have looked like. Don’t worry, Jo Koy and the 81st Golden Globes, you still hold the distinction of being the worst host and awards telecast in my not-insignificant memory, but this Emmys telecast came much closer than I would have predicted. It was an ill-conceived mess, punctuated by well-deserved wins and emotional and effective speeches, but rarely helped by Bargatze’s consistently uneasy performance.

In terminology borrowed from sports coverage, I assumed Bargatze had a low ceiling, but a high floor. He’s not a song-and-dance man, so he wasn’t going to be able to do what Cynthia Erivo did at the Tonys or even what Conan O’Brien, as a lark, did at the Oscars. I figured he was more likely to deliver low-key charm, keep everybody comfortable and spend very little time in the spotlight. Instead, he decided to make everybody uncomfortable, sometimes as a choice and sometimes just as a matter of course. Bargatze bungled the names of people and shows — Gilmores Now? — rarely looked at home finding and addressing the correct camera and somehow was given only one recurring piece of business, that tally of how much money Hollywood stars were trying to steal from kids.

The only thing saving Bargatze and the show from nadir status is that there was no sense of hostility in the room, which could not be said when Jo Koy was bombing at the Globes and decided to turn on his writers and then basically vanished from the show.

Structurally, Bargatze’s hosting was strange. There was no monologue. Instead, he repurposed his extremely funny George Washington sketches from Saturday Night Live as a dramatic irony-infused, overlong scene with Philo T. Farnsworth talking about the potential wonders of television. I chuckled repeatedly, but jokes about The Learning Channel not being about learning and The Bear not being a comedy and people preferring Yellowstone and football to Emmy-winning shows felt between two and 15 years old. But again, I chuckled.

From there, though, it was all about the Boys & Girls Clubs, with no other extended jokes. It’s ALWAYS a struggle to keep people on schedule at these awards shows, but normally the extended gags — Conan sealing Bob Newhart in an airtight box or Anthony Anderson enlisting his disapproving mother or John Lithgow’s “disappointed” face — cease to be a factor. Here, the pressure was on for three hours.

It has to be said: Nobody was played off. So if that’s among your criteria, it was a success. But for every winner who used the pressure to amp up their own energy in likable ways — Cristin Milioti was a delight — there were 10 speeches where people got flustered or found themselves commenting on whether they were running long or short. You could have cut half the blather about people’s speech length (and nearly every bit of presentation banter) and given that time to the winners; who knows what they could have done?

There were great speeches, from Jeff Hiller’s astonishment to Trammel Tillman’s celebration of his mother to Owen Cooper’s teenage sincerity to Noah Wyle’s more seasoned sincerity. But it’s my sense that there was concern that if you let people talk, people would get political, and with very few exceptions — Hannah Einbinder supported Palestine and the Eagles — people did not get political. They were too preoccupied with the clock. If you consider all of the inflection points the industry is at — from the promise or threat of AI to the January fires to the possibility of monopolistic consolidation — almost nothing of substance was said about anything.

The TV Academy tried to infuse substance. A special award was given to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting last weekend, but Academy chair Cris Abrego made sure to give an impassioned speech on behalf of the CPB in the main show. Progressive firebrands Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen were presented with the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award, but while it was easy to hear the political undertones in their speech, they focused on the importance of accentuating love and hope in a moment of fear. Those two awards were condensed into a single programming block and perhaps the producers deserve credit for not including a “LIBERAL CONTENT” trigger warning coming out of the previous ad break.

That left the producers and CBS trying hard to pander to the rest of the country in other ways, as best they could. And “as best they could” apparently meant, “with lots of country music.” There was a so-so country cover of the Golden Girls theme, performed by Reba McEntire and two people whose names Nate Bargatze couldn’t figure out how to say (Karen Fairchild, Kimberly Schlapman). There was a better performance of “Go Rest High on That Mountain” by Vince Gill and Lainey Wilson accompanying the Necrology, which I’m sure left out some of your favorite people and for that, I’m sorry. There were semi-arbitrary tributes to broadcast shows including Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Gilmore Girls (one of the night’s few well-written comedy bits) and Survivor, just so CBS got a little love.

Actually, CBS won the most emotional award of the night. Congratulations to CBS for canceling The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, a suspiciously timed and presented decision that probably won the show its outstanding talk series Emmy. I have never, in all my time watching award shows, seen a prize that was so inevitable and so anticipated. The roar when Bryan Cranston read the show’s name among the nominees was so huge and so cathartic that Cranston just held on the applause and the appreciation before announcing that Colbert had won, leading to a lengthy standing ovation, already Colbert’s second of the night.

“I have never loved my country more desperately. God bless America,” Colbert said, before paraphrasing Prince, “God bless America. Stay strong, be brave, and if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor.”

And the awards themselves? They were fine! Good and deserved, even. Hiller was a huge surprise. Britt Lower was a medium-sized surprise (over CBS’ Kathy Bates). Adam Randall from Slow Horses winning for drama direction was justifiable, but a head-scratcher. Generally, the Adolescence near-sweep was a foregone conclusion, awkward only when Elizabeth Banks talked up the five female nominees in the limited series directing category before giving the trophy to the only man in the field, Philip Barantini. There was more ambiguity as to whether The Pitt would win drama series, but listening to audience responses throughout, it felt likely. And The Studio? Well, if there’s anything Hollywood loves more than patting itself on the butt, it’s taking money from children.

Or that’s certainly the message many people will take away from the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards.