US Edition 
62nd Primetime Emmy Awards: NBC, US TV review
NBC’s 62nd Emmy Awards show honouring the best in American primetime TV was a tedious night that begs the question: what’s the point today of a television awards show?
The Emmy Awards, aired on NBC this year, are the Academy Awards for American television - at least that’s how most people think of them. But there’s really no comparison because movies and their attendant cast and crew cannot be repeat nominees as TV shows can and there also is no comparison in the range of products on offer.
Hosted by Late Night’s Jimmy Fallon, NBC tried everything but an Obama impersonator to entertain a Los Angeles theatre audience so big that it could fill a football stadium. The opening gambit was by far the most entertaining as Fallon, Tina Fey of 30 Rock, and cast members of the musical show Glee sang Bruce Springsteen’s rock ballad Born to Run.
Later, Fallon walked through the huge audience strumming an acoustic guitar as pre-selected actors joined him in faux folk, derisive songs about shows and their people. Some of the entertainment ploys perhaps were inside jokes. A backstage announcer who was supposed to hate Fallon fell flat and a repeated video segment asking director nominees what their mothers had wanted them to do in their careers came across as more earnest than funny.
This year’s outstanding program nominees included an even split between broadcast networks and cable channels, but there were few surprises. Popular series from last season such as Mad Men, The Good Wife, Glee, Modern Family, and Nurse Jackie continued to win. AMC’s Breaking Bad about a cancer-stricken high school teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico who manufactures methamphetamine with one of his students captured both the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor awards for a drama series.
But the jam-packed three-hour showed little freshness. Presenter Ricky Gervais provided some merriment for several minutes with his complaints that he couldn’t get a beer backstage - and why not? Well, it’s puritanical America, Mate. Waiters finally appeared offering bottles of brew to people in the first few rows, who seemed confused about how to interact with this audience-participation theatre.
In a touching moment, film veteran Al Pacino, winning for his portrayal of convicted doctor-assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian on HBO’s You Don’t Know Jack, pointed out the real doctor’s presence in the audience who rose to his feet to a round of applause. And Steve Shill, first-time nominee and Best Director of a Dramatic Series winner, acknowledged his unexpected journey from England’s Lake District to the Miami set of Dexter, the award winning Showtime series about a psychopathic killer who works as a blood splatter expert for the Miami Police Department.
The Primetime Emmy Awards show is not the glitzy and glam Academy Awards or the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s exclusive Golden Globes, although television has many categories nominated. Instead, it’s a PR show for the industry’s best primetime entertainment programming that started in Hollywood 60 years ago. But today, with constantly published viewer ratings and a tv monitor in every American residence, hotel, bar, doctor’s waiting room, train station, airport lounge, and elsewhere, what promotion is really necessary - if it isn’t entertaining to watch?