The Emmy Awards were last night, and has come to be expected, it was overall a mixed bag. There were some genuinely great moments, blended in with some very strange and awkward bits of television.
But first, let’s start with the winners. The winners could more or less be predicted a mile away, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Ted Lasso wound up taking home awards for Best Comedy Series and Outstanding Directing, as well as Best Acting awards for Jason Sudeikis and Brett Goldstein. Jean Smart wound up taking home the award for Best Leading Actress for Hacks, and Sheryl Lee Ralph took home Best Supporting Actress for Abbott Elementary.
Speaking of Abbott Elementary, the newcomer to the Awards took home a second award for Outstanding Writing. When Will Arnett came out to present the award, he dragged Jimmy Kimmel with him, literally. And Kimmel proceeded to stay laying there during Quinta’s speech, before Arnett dragged him back off. You don’t have to be a psychic to predict that the internet would not be happy with him taking the attention away like that. It was just odd.
Another big moment for comedy was when Jerrod Carmichael won Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special for Rothaniel. Carmichael was joined by a man in a ski-mask who hugged him right before he went onstage. That mysterious masked man, it turns out, was Bo Burnham, who directed the special.
As we’ve come to expect, Saturday Night Live also wound up taking home the gold for Outstanding Live Variety Series. After they won, Lorne Michaels gave a speech and confirmed that there’s four new additional cast members joining the show this year. We’ll supposedly hear more “in the next few days.”
Last night’s host was Kenan Thompson. By himself, he was funny as always and would’ve made an even better host if they didn’t try to shoehorn gimmicks into the show and just let Thompson be himself. The two bits that really fell flat was a bizarre interpretive dance to TV theme songs and having Kumail Nanjiani behind the bar as a bartender. At least we got to see a Kenan and Kel reunion in the latter.
All in all, it was what we’ve come to expect at this point.