AND THE LOSERS ARE...

 

People probably fell for this
gag, too.

Am I the only one who realized from the get-go that Nate Bargatze's Boys & Girls Club donation stunt at last weekend's Emmy Awards was just that: a stunt? Apparently so, seeing how everyone from a Time magazine columnist to the sorehead in Variety condemned it, the latter calling it a "clumsy exercise in celebrity humiliation." 

That was the whole idea! Nate, like Ricky Gervais, knows that the home viewers enjoy celebrity humiliation, clumsy or not. This was just his way of proving what everyone outside show business already knew: actors will deny children an hour of playing softball if it means hearing themselves yammer at an awards ceremony. 

The critics were so busy not getting the joke that they missed entirely a far more important component of the Emmys, one that has been growing for years but gone unmentioned, like a family's problem child turning into a career criminal. Outside of Saturday Night Live, Abbott Elementary, reality TV, and late-night talk shows, no network series has a chance of winning anything. Because they're not even nominated. It's cable's and streaming's world now; we just watch it.

Do the networks consider the irony of giving over three hours of primetime to honor TV shows other than their own? Now that's celebrity humiliation. They might as well come out and admit, "We know we suck, but look who's hosting the Emmys!" And having Nate Bargatze definitely helped, seeing that the ratings were up 8% this year, with 7.4 million people watching. Sure, that's down a staggering 15 million from its all-time high in 2000, but a win is a win, even when it's a loss.

As my friend the former TV exec explained to me, the networks still air the Emmys because don't want to admit defeat -- even though they're defeated year after year -- and the show provides great ad revenue for one night. Plus, they get to promote their own streaming platforms where they still don't get any nominations.

Little did Kevin Spacey know
the title also referred to his
career.

When Netflix debuted House of Cards in 2013, making it the first series to have an entire series' episodes available at once, my immediate thought was Network TV suddenly seems old-fashioned. For sure, it's not going anywhere any time soon, as it's making enough money to survive. But as with late-night talk shows, the networks seem to still exist due to habit rather than quality. 

Back to last weekend's Emmy "celebrity humiliation". Even though the winners' long-winded speeches dropped Nat Bargatze's donation by tens of thousands of dollars, by the end he more than doubled his original pledge to $250,000. CBS didn't even match that, kicking in a measly $100,000. Maybe times are tougher for the networks than even I realized.

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