The 2018 Emmys Manages to be Fitfully Amusing

The Emmys Statuette By Courtesy of The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences

This year’s Emmys hosts, Colin Jost and Michael Che, resembled flight attendants who ask for the last time, through resigned smiles, that you fasten your seatbelt. They avoided egregious misfires, but their wan deliveries probably only barely prevented the expressive meme darling Chrissy Teigen from falling asleep on John Legend’s shoulder again. The joint hosting may have helped reflect the most diverse group of nominees in Emmy history, but “the more the merrier” was not the case Monday night as they lacked the ebullient chattiness of Seth Meyers and the jocular charm of Jimmy Kimmel, both former solo hosts.

Some of their of-the-moment quips were clever and revelatory of the changing landscape of television, especially sprinkled amid the program’s retrospective segments, which included a tribute to Aretha Franklin and other late television stars, and a hilarious “Reparations Emmys” bit in which Michael Che rewarded erstwhile nominees whose talents were overlooked in favor of white artists. They rightfully balked at Netflix’s content monopoly and its all-too permissive taste, having amassed around 700 original series: “If you’re a network executive, that’s the scariest thing you could possibly hear, except maybe, ‘Sir, Ronan Farrow is on Line 1.’” (Farrow won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his New Yorker exposés of industry linchpins Harvey Weinstein and recently, Les Moonves.) In one of his most successful jokes, Jost pitched an all-white reboot of “Atlanta” called “15 Miles Outside of Atlanta,” in which white women would call the police on the cast of “Atlanta.” But he so often deployed his “Weekend Update” deadpan, as if flipping through a soberingly unadorned Powerpoint presentation, that it took a moment to realize that some of the things he’d said were actually funny.

The tone of the night modulated unpredictably from bland to perfectly, spontaneously sentimental, to slightly zany and affectatious, in no particular order. “Saturday Night Live” veterans Kenan Thompson and Kate McKinnon welcomed the “One of Each” dancers to the stage, to mock Hollywood’s parading of its meager diversity achievements, its smug attempts to check “every box.” Jost and Che seemed to have approached their repertoire with the same ethos; aside from some hits, their socially conscious jokes seemed defensive, as if they had scribbled all the work they could show for a math problem, without a conclusive answer. The way diversity zingers were wedged into every presentation made the program the most drily comprehensive one possible. The references almost became galling when they were on-the-nose, like when Emilia Clarke served a weak, “The comedy writing category, once dominated by white male nerds, now boasts more female and diverse nerds than ever before.”

In a heartwarming moment, Glenn Weiss proposed to his girlfriend Jan, on stage, to resounding whoops and cheers. In a gloriously simple bit, Sandra Oh—the first Asian woman to be nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series—ripped the envelope, and screeched, “The winner is ‘La La Land!’” No one seemed very surprised when Rachel Brosnahan won the Emmy for Outstanding Leading Actress in a Comedy Series, including herself. She deserved it, for her bitingly witty, cannily brash Midge Maisel in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and she honored Midge’s self-empowerment by encouraging the audience to vote. She also entertained while presenting with Larry David, as they discussed how awkward it is to attempt obligatory award-stage banter, feeling as if they’re on a blind date.

But some leaned too hard into awkwardness. A skit featuring unwitting presenters played by Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph puttered on for too long, and perhaps demonstrated the uncritical indulgence of each other by the ‘Saturday Night Live’ mainstays who dominated the presentations and later gathered on stage to accept the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, fraternizing with casual familiarity. Matthew Rhys won his long overdue Emmy for for his work in “The Americans,” an exquisitely suspenseful show about the politics of loyalty at a micro and macroscopic level. It is criminal, though, that his TV wife and real-life partner, Keri Russell, also nominated, didn’t win for her role as the grittily resilient KGB agent Elizabeth Jennings.

Amid the carefully calibrated spectacles, there were some nuggets of authenticity to behold. An utterly dumbfounded Merritt Wever fumbled through her acceptance speech for the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series Emmy after attempting to read from a crumpled piece of paper, and managed a simply affecting, “I’m still shocked that you’ve made a space for me and [my character] Mary Agnes.” Betty White’s appreciative cheeriness ballasted the wilting white flag that took the form of hackneyed jokes by Che and Jost about television being a movie-star’s second choice. She said, with twinkling eyes, “It’s incredible that I’m still in this business and that you are still putting up with me...It’s such a blessed business to be in.” It seems that the industry has indeed had its share of tribulations, in the face of #MeToo upheavals, in its inadequate and halting efforts at diverse representation, but who better to restore hope in television’s endurance and special charm than Betty White?

—Staff writer Claire N. Park can be reached at claire.park@thecrimson.com.