2006 Emmy Nominations: A Week Later

This time last week, like many of my fellow blogger that routinely wax poetic about our favorite television shows ripped the Emmys different year, same results despite the new voting system. But after a week of thinking about it I have come to realize it is not the new voting system that is still flawed, in fact it may not have been broken in the first place.

If you let me go on a tangent for a moment, last year Rolling Stone put out a list of the 500 greatest songs of the Rock ‘n’ Roll era and like most lists of its ilk, I overanalyzed every selection and read through it multiple times. There were a bunch of sequencing issues that bugged my like my two favorite songs, All Along the Watchtower and Superstition were 48 and 74 respectively. But the part of the list that really got under my skin was how songs from formative years were omitted with bands like Dave Matthews Band, Beastie Boys, Weezer, and A Tribe Called Quest getting overlooked. To put things in perspective, The Beatles charted 23 songs while there were 24 songs released in the nineties on the list.

At the end of the list, Rolling Stone also published the list of music journalist and musicians that made up the panelist and there was a distinctive characteristic that ties most of them together: they were extremely old. If fact when I scanned the list the only people on the list that I was familiar list (and that was most) the only ballots cast by people under forty were by members of The Donnas. So for the first time in my decade of subscribing to the magazine, I actually wrote them a letter about it, granted they did edit it before printing it, they took out the part where I wrote “You did something that even the Republican were unable to do this year: suppress the youth vote.”

Back to the Emmys, unlike the Rolling Stone list where the voters were released, we don’t know (at least I don’t) who the Emmy voters are, but I think it is safe to assume that they are all extremely old themselves which could explain Martin Sheen, and if there is anything my grandpa taught me, old people love Martin Sheen. So in my long winded explanation, it’s not the voting system that is flawed, it’s the people that are doing the voting who are most likely well past the age of the majority of television watchers which could explain how Stockard Channing could get a nomination for a show no one watched over her more deserving, younger contemporaries.

So instead of changing the voting system, what the Emmys need to do is change how the select voters to get more younger people involved, then maybe Lauren Graham, Kristen Bell, and Everybody Hates Chris will get the respect they deserve because it’s not their respective channels get overlooked, it’s that old people just don’t watch UPN or WB. But with all the rampart ageism in this year’s nomination who would have, five years ago predicted, the chick from Poison Ivy 3 (and I know all the guys out there, or at the very least saw the clips) would be the only actor of her generation to get a nomination?

One other suggestion I made last week, that may have got lost in the shuffle since it was at the bottom of a very long post, so I put it here so it will get more viewers (or you can always check out my original Emmy Nominations post):

Usually I prepare what I am going to write the night before and I had an anti-Desperate Housewives being included in the Comedy categories rant already to roll, but surprisingly only one supporting nomination this year so I was unable to use it in the individual nomination analysis. But since I thought it was a good idea, I’m still going to throw it out there to the people who run the Emmys: create a new Dramedy category. Back in the eighties and earlier, most shows were strictly in either in the drama or comedy column. But in the nineties and shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Ally McBeal, more and more shows are equal parts laughs and tears and have been routinely overlooked. And the addition of the category would benefit the award show because it would mean more stars to nominate. Had there been a Dramedy Series category, it may have looked something like this:

Desperate Housewives
Everybody Hates Chris
Gilmore Girls
Rescue Me
Veronica Mars

And to the Emmys people, if you do decide to use my idea, all I ask in return is to be included as one of the people that does the nominating. Oh and one of those gift bags you give out to all the presenters.