2012 Emmy Awards : Homeland ruining the win streak

2012 Emmy Awards : Homeland ruining the win streak
It's about a chance to provide up on the Emmys. Really, truly, once and for all. The press and the country must quit focusing. The tv market could display its solidarity by giving up all the statuettes, heaving them into a yawning crucible and smelting them. The fluid discarded steel could be recast into one Prius-sized Emmy to be distributed by Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Jon Stewart, who were the only individuals to demonstrate edgy verve onstage during an otherwise hopeless, foreseen display organised by that deadpan cipher of evening, Jimmy Kimmel.

Stewart, recognizing the Tenth successive Emmy for excellent wide range sequence for “The Everyday Show,” recognized the maddening ridiculousness of the work out.

“Years from now, when the World is just a losing husk and aliens check out, they will see a box of these,” Stewart said, having his Emmy aloft, “and they will know just how foreseen these [expletive shows] are.”

So let us get the actual bit of information out of the way before we go returning to the dirge: Don Draper passed away in a enemy attack!

“Mad Men,” which won best dilemma sequence for previous times four decades, dropped to Showtime’s weird CIA thrillfest “Homeland,” in which Claire Danes goes a little crazy while trying to type through gossip both in the area and in her go. Danes won best celebrity in a dilemma and her co-star, Damian Lewis, prolonged the winless skills of Draper himself, Jon Hamm. “Homeland,” which also snagged an prize for composing and is Showtime’s first best-series prize champion, throw a pallid Langleyesque mild on a wedding that has had nowadays the art-deco gloss of Madison Road.

Burnishing that investment feel were two females who won for enjoying a actual prospective v. p. and a bogus actual v. p.. Julianne Moore won best cause celebrity in a miniseries or TV film for enjoying Debbie Palin in HBO’s “Game Modify,” which also won best miniseries or TV film. Julia Louis-Dreyfus won best cause celebrity in a funny sequence for enjoying Vice Chief executive Selina She, the bumbling sparkplug a pulse rate from the obama administration in HBO’s sour half-hour Beltway parody “Veep.”

Louis-Dreyfus, gathering her third profession Emmy, started studying co-nominee Amy Poehler’s popularity conversation. The two females, interesting in a subversive draw they ready themselves, offered one of the few entertaining, well-timed minutes in an otherwise shateringly scripted evening larded with Kimmel’s wan pieces. Display A: After “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” did not win best wide range sequence, Kimmel requested protection to carry his actual mother and father from the audience to be able to penalize them for relaxing that he could accomplish any desire he desired. Get it? No? That is because it’s not really a laugh. It was a empty, held nuisance.

The other big winners were tiresomely predictable, and predictability makes for really, really, really bad television. The much-heralded Lena Dunham, the 26-year-old creator and star of HBO’s buzzy “Girls,” lost all three of her solo nominations within the first 45 minutes of the show. ABC’s “Modern Family” won its third consecutive Emmy for comedy series, and its supporting actors, Julie Bowen and Eric Stonestreet, exercised their “Why am I winning this again?” faces. Five of the first six acting awards went to performers who had already won once for their roles. These winners all seemed chagrined or perplexed, and spent a precious portion of their speeches apologizing to their overlooked — and, in all instances, more deserving — co-nominees. Even Jon Cryer’s wife seemed baffled when Cryer won best leading actor in a comedy for “Two and a Half Men.”

When he was handed his second Emmy, Cryer said, “Something has clearly gone terribly wrong.”

Not “something.”

Everything.

Speaking of Cryer, is there an assemblage of words more depressing than “the season premiere of ‘Two and a Half Men’?”

But back to the pressing question: How can TV people make for such dismal TV? It’s not enough to have one or two nice moments in a three-hour telecast that rewards many of the same faces year after year. The show was front-loaded with comedy awards, then transitioned to drama and saved the miniseries and TV-movie categories — and therefore the bigger and stodgier stars (Kevin Costner won lead actor in a miniseries or movie for “Hatfields and McCoys”) — for the third hour, when viewers had presumably expired from sheer boredom. The director of the Emmy telecast won for directing the Tonys, and his charmless, overly long acceptance speech from inside the director’s truck illustrated everything that’s wrong with these shows: They navel-gaze without the proper volume of irony or rollicking self-awareness.

Comedian Louis C.K. — beloved for his sour wryness, and for being above the glitzy blandness of Hollywood — had two chances to give the show the Heimlich after he won best writing for a comedy series and also for a variety special.

“Well,” he said, “I won an Emmy just now so . . . I’m just gonna thank people.”

See, that’s exactly what we don’t want you to do. Keep that in mind next year, stars — although, ideally, none of us will be watching.