So the Media's Obsessing Over What They Watched on TV Last Night, So I Guess #TheNormals Have to Comment On It, Too

So -- the Emmys. Out of all the awards shows no one cares about, this might be the awards show no one cares about the hardest.

It was apparently a three hour long #GirlPowerHugbox.

Emmy loved the ladies tonight.

In a stunning victory for streaming TV and for politicized drama, "The Handmaid's Tale" won awards for Best Drama Series, Best Actress (Elizabeth Moss), Best Supporting Actress (Ann Down), Best Director (Reed Morano) and Best Writing (Bruce Miller)...

It was a win for women in a patriarchal society! And a win for Hulu, which has been looking to break into the streaming field dominated by Netflix and Amazon.

Many of the handmaids made out just as well as their show: Moss finally landed Best Actress after multiple losses for "Mad Men" and one for "Top of the Lake." Veteran New York theater actress Dowd (who's terrifying in the show) seemed sincerely surprised to receive her trophy. Though she didn’t take home a trophy tonight, Alexis Bledel (who plays rebellious handmaid Ofglen) won Best Guest Actress in a Drama Series at the Emmys’ Creative Arts ceremony last weekend.

Yay, #GirlPower! In case you didn't know, "The Handmaid's Tale" is about a future dystopia set in America in 2017 in which Donald Trump marauds the countryside grabbing pussies and saying "boobs" to Brooke Baldwin.

You know what I'm hopeful about, with all these women winning Emmys for shows no one watches? I'm just hopeful that this sparks networks to make more shows only for women. Because there are barely any of those on TV.

The Emmys were so politicized that both Planned Parenthood and NARAL have been celebrating Hollywood's bravery in pushing typical Hollywood politics.

But the Emmys didn't just shower awards on Political Soap Operas and Morality Plays. They engaged in the art form itself, constantly speechifying about Prog Doctrine.

Awards shows, by definition, are insufferable: the rich and famous gathering yearly to reward each other for being rich and famous. Yet this year's Emmys had an almost unbearable smugness to it.

Factor One was host Stephen Colbert, who -- no matter your politics -- has spent the past 10 months radiating self-satisfaction, too often mistaking speechifying for comedic monologuing.

...

We hit the smugness apex toward the end of the night, when Charlie Brooker won an Emmy for an episode of his dystopian anthology series, "Black Mirror." After lamenting that his dark vision of the near future was too "on the nose," he offered up an idea to the room:

"Maybe if all the beautiful people in this auditorium could start to physically make love with each other, or yourselves, on the count of three, this world would be a far better place."

Nah, that's what the after-parties are for.

Steven Colbert, who is yet another white male but who crowed about how "diverse" the nominees and award winners were, really did some innovative jokes about Trump last night. I'm sure all of the #RealNews media is linking all of Steven Colbert's innovative jokes about Trump, but here are Jimmy Kimmel's best Trump jokes when he hosted in 2016, and here are the best jokes made by celebrity presenters about Trump from 2015's Emmy broadcast.

Really edgy, novel stuff, guys! You truly are the Creative Class.

Incidentally, the show also featured Twitter Bubble-World controversy. See, apparently they had on Sean Spicer to goof on himself -- I guess the schtick was that he was aping the over-the-top potrayal of himself by Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live -- and the Totalitarian Prog Censors began screaming that this was "normalizing" Spicer and giving him a platform.

The Washington Post rounded up a herd of shaken liberal influencers who were horrified to see the Emmy Awards "normalize" a former White House press secretary. McCarthy herself may not have appreciated the reverence. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, she shared her anxiety over Spicer's efforts to reclaim this satire with absurd self-seriousness. "No," she described her thoughts hearing Spicer mockingly threaten to push his podium toward adversarial reporters in the White House briefing room. "That’s not your joke to make."

More spazzing out about this collected by Twitchy.

And how did all this politicization of escapism turn out, ratings-wise?

Funny you should ask -- it looks like the ratings were even worse than 2016's, which itself was the lowest-rated Emmys broadcast in television history.

If this firms up in final ratings, it will surpass 2016 as the worst-rated Emmys of all time, and 2016 surpassed the previous low, and so on. In fact, as Newsweek pointed out yesterday, the Emmys have lost 50% of their audience since 2013 and the lowest ratings since 1990, and last night’s extravaganza certainly didn’t turn the ship around.

Ed Morrissey quotes Matt Wilstein at the Daily Beast, commenting on "entertainment's" embrace of the doctrine of No-Escapism:

Stephen Colbert rose to the top of the late-night ratings -- and scored himself an Emmy nomination -- by going after President Donald Trump night after night on The Late Show. So there was something ironic about him using his opening number as host of the Emmy Awards to argue that television is the perfect distraction from the world’s problems.

Noah Rothstein (">cited earlier about Sean Spicer) notes the current "crisis" at ESPN, the MTV Awards shows, etc., and a catastrophic year for Hollywood's theatrical box office, and wonders if this is a trend: The Great National Tune-Out.

Maybe the politics on display were irrelevant; maybe the rise of streaming services has made traditional broadcast television a dying product. Maybe. But the Emmys misfortunes are of a familiar sort. This tune out is starting to feel like a trend.

Movies, cable and broadcast television, music; this tune out isn't entirely about cord cutting. This is something broader. Any attempt to divorce politics from the public's waning interest in entertainment media cannot compel without addressing the ubiquity of liberal political messaging permeating the products artists produce. Of course, no one can or should compel an artist to sacrifice their values for commercial viability. Nor, however, can you force consumers to endure a scolding they'd rather avoid.

Kellyanne Conway criticized the "sameness" in the so-called Creative Class' various low-ratings offerings:

"They got plucked and polished and waxed and some of them didn't eat for two months -- and all for what? To sound the same? And they have a right to speak," Conway told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" Monday morning. "Between the Emmys, the Miss America pageant was very politicized, our sports are very politicized, and it looks like the ratings are suffering. It looks like America is responding by tuning out because they want you to stick to your knitting."

One can only hope. It was Andrew Breitbart's dream that the media be destroyed -- not reduced in influence, but bankrupted. He predicted "This will all be gone, gone in five years," maybe in 2012 or so.

His prediction might have been off by a few years, but I sure hope this will all be gone, gone, with massive bankruptcies and layoffs, in maybe five more years.

Before they continue going down the road of refusing to offer escapism to an audience which literally only seeks escapism from them, they should check out how that's been working out for Marvel comics...

...which is selling so poorly it that it's causing many comic book stores to shut down.

Bonus: I didn't see this until now -- former celebrity Alysso Milano has reported Trump to Twitter's Social Justice War Council for threatening violence to women. Presumably because he retweeted that Trump-hits-a-golfball-that-hits-Hillary tweet.

posted by Ace at 05:44 PM

| Access Comments