The Big Picture

The 2024 Emmys focused too much on nostalgia and past TV shows, taking away from the current TV landscape. The same few shows won most of the awards, making the ceremony predictable and unexciting. The choice of Anthony Anderson as host was misguided due to the sexual assault allegations against him, highlighting the lack of consideration in awards show hosts.

If you don’t usually watch awards ceremonies, and you wanted to watch this year’s Emmys, hosted by black-ish star Anthony Anderson, delayed by last year’s WGA and SAG strikes, you had plenty of time to catch up on all the shows nominated for excellence in performance, direction, costume design, and more. However, while several shows ended up on the ballot, it turns out that viewers seemingly only needed to watch two of them: The Bear and Succession, which swept their respective comedy and drama categories and knocked everyone else out of the water, much to the chagrin of anyone trying to stay awake long enough to make it through the three-hour ceremony.

The Emmys Ceremony to celebrate the 75th edition of the Primetime Emmy awards. Release Date January 15, 2024 Main Genre Awards Show Genres Awards Show Seasons 75 Studio Fox

But before the awards were piled in heaps on Hulu and HBO for their shows about dysfunctional, anxiety-inducing families (found or biological), they’d already set themselves up for failure, attempting to live up to the massive milestone that is the ceremony’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Instead of celebrating the future of television, or the medium as it exists now, the ceremony chose to throw it back to the sitcoms, dramas, and reality shows that made the medium what it is today, from All in the Family to Martin and Cheers, by reuniting the casts of those shows to present various awards, trotting them out as stars from a different age.

While the tributes were well-constructed, and it was fun to see certain stars back on the big stage — Rob Reiner speaking Yiddish is certainly an improvement on Jo Koy’s disastrous attempt at a Golden Globes monologue — it all felt a little too constructed, taking away from the rare moments during wins when something interesting and special actually did occur. Sure, we all know how special I Love Lucy is, or how The Twilight Zone changed the fabric of science fiction TV as we know it, but by distracting from the current TV landscape, it seems less like the Television Academy was honoring the history of television, and more like an attempt to cover up the events of the strikes, which left us with a dearth of programming and an awards conversation focused on the same handful of shows, all of which have already been awarded numerous times this season already.

The 2024 Emmys Were Bloated and Predictable
Image via Fox

When awards shows are already bloated as it is, the lengthy tributes — including an extended reunion for the cast of Martin and, for some reason, Travis Barker playing the drum fill from “In the Air Tonight” — became tiresome even before the halfway point, when afterward they were overtaken by The Bear and Succession’s numerous wins. More than honoring shows past, they seemed to highlight the faults of contemporary TV, bringing out past stars like show dogs for a better era of entertainment when things didn’t get routinely canceled after one or two seasons and deleted from streaming services, and when television could actually make stars out of people, rather than turning them into memes.

The winners of the night’s awards — supposedly the focus of all of this — didn’t make the experience much better. This year saw an unsurprising list of nominees, with most acting categories being dominated by three or so shows, so none of the wins were particularly surprising either. The Bear and Succession ran away with practically the entire show, with Beef following shortly behind, and after about the third category, it became obvious how the night was going to go, and how much coffee I was going to need to survive them if everything was going to sound exactly the same.

‘The Bear’ Cleaned up at the 2024 Emmys, but at What Cost?
Image via FOX

It’s a bit of a disappointment to watch the same two or three shows win everything, even coming from someone who loved the first season of The Bear. The sentiment makes ceremonies like the Emmys hardly even worth watching, especially in the height of awards season when audiences are presented with one after the other after the other. They all feel identical, with no surprise wins or moving speeches to keep you awake after 9 p.m. — how much nuance can one person possibly manage by their third speech?

At this point, it seems like a rote fact that the same three things are always going to take home all of the awards, so what’s the point in watching? By the time Succession won its third or fourth award, I’d all but checked out of the ceremony entirely — the only time I was even vaguely interested was seeing Keeley Hawes appear sitting next to her husband, winner Matthew Macfadyen, looking as stunning as ever. In the time it took to get to their win for Best Drama Series, I could’ve caught up on a number of new shows, and I can hardly assume that this ceremony was a better use of my time.

The one notable exception to the rote nature of the awards themselves was Niecy Nash-Betts, who won her first award after five nominations. Her heartfelt joy and thanking herself — along with dedicating her award to Black women murdered by the police — was heartrending. It was easily the high point of a night otherwise defined by rote, boring speeches for shows that I was sick of hearing about by the end of it. Additionally, though he couldn’t attend, watching Elton John make history by earning his EGOT — only the nineteenth person to ever do so — made my rock’n’roll heart happy, the burst of energy I needed to make it through the rest of the disappointing awards.

Selecting Anthony Anderson as Emmys Host Was a Misstep
Image via Matt Sayles/FOX

But regardless of whether or not the ceremony was any good, the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth the instant the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences chose Anderson to host. It’s another in a series of missteps in awards show hosts — see also: Jo Koy’s refusal to admit that he bombed at the Golden Globes — this time because of the three different rape and sexual assault allegations against the star (which Anderson has denied). There is no separating art from the artist here, not when the Academy practically has its pick of emcees when it comes to ceremonies like this. Not only do these awards associations continue to choose from the same crop of men every year, but now they can’t even be bothered to keep accused rapists and serial assaulters out of their rotation.

Awards shows are already difficult to connect with if you aren’t a film and TV buff, given the hard separation between those who wax poetic on these stages when they win, dressed in clothes worth more than what most people earn in a year, and the people who watch the things they make. It’s a lot of pageantry for not a whole lot of substance, and the Emmys are no exception, particularly not when they seem this tone-deaf, whether it’s Anderson’s hiring or the focus on “the good ol’ days.” It’s much easier to simply Google the winners in the morning, and get the kind of good night’s sleep that watching one of these on the East Coast robs you of.

The Emmys REVIEW ProsNiecy Nash-Betts and Elton John getting awards recognition was a high point in the night. ConsThe focus on past shows took away from what was supposedly meant to be a celebration of modern television. Rather than spreading the love, the same shows won over and over again in what became a predictable ceremony. Anthony Anderson being selected as host despite serious allegations made against him left a bad taste in the mouth.