What We Learned From The Emmys

I would not have wanted to be Anthony Anderson yesterday morning.

Given how badly Jo Koy had bombed at the Golden Globes the week prior, the pressure was surely on.

Fortunately, Anderson was more than up to the task, and while he may have been upstaged some by his mother (who is no doubt fielding talk and reality show requests today) the salute to the TV of yore was a calming balm in what has been an incredibly tumultuous past several months.

A few clicks away on Fox News, Donald Trump was reclaiming Iowa, but over on Fox Broadcasting, the world was still the happy place of our respective childhoods, where the remaining casts of shows like Cheers, Allie McBeal and All In The Family could reconvene on their old sets and bring us back to the pre-streaming days of big boxy 32-inch cathode ray TVs.

It was, above all, a somewhat bittersweet reminder of the central role that television played in our lives during the reign of the Great American Monoculture, a role I often fear it will never play again.

Meanwhile, on the award stage, there were several truths that seemed self-evident.

The Second Golden Age of TV Is Coming To A Close.

Succession. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Ted Lasso. Better Call Saul. Barry. They all dominated the nominations and they all completed their final season last year. You can even add Beef to the mix as it was a “limited” series that is unlikely to make a reappearance. 

The days when streaming services spend millions creating scores of highbrow series seems to be behind us. First off, few of them actually became hits—there is, it seems, no actual formula after all, and, even in this age of AI, humans still seem to be the only ones who can reliably figure out which shows are going to be hits. 

Hence HBO’s domination.

There’s also the flip to that: Ginny and Georgia and The Night Agent are the top two shows on Netflix. Neither was nominated for anything and while critics may turn up their noses, a plurality of Netflix subscribers clearly love them.

And streaming services are in the business of pleasing subscribers, not critics. Or should be, anyway.

So there’s that and it’s something the streaming services are all beginning to finally reckon with.

25 Week Seasons Create An Unrivaled Degree Of Familiarity  

Yes, there wasn’t much else on in the days of the Big Three, but seeing all those cast reunions with their old sets and still familiar faces was as solid a reminder as any that the sheer volume of these shows created a level of familiarity that is missing from streaming today, one that the networks should consider bringing back. 

10 episodes is no match for 25, and the value of frequency is a lesson that Team Influencer has learned well and it’s one reason why all those TikTok and YouTube stars have such a tight bond with their audiences. 

TV needs to get on the bandwagon too and try and become more like television and less like movies.

HBO Is Still HBO

HBO’s dominance was pretty hard to miss, from the Best Supporting Actor in a Drama category that only featured actors from two HBO series (Succession and The White Lotus) to the fact that, in an odd mirroring of the events simultaneously taking place in the frozen upper Midwest, there really wasn’t much of a second place finisher, especially when you looked at the list of nominees in total. 

There had been fears that with its old leadership gone and a new executive team in place at WBD, that HBO’s uncanny ability to create shows that frequently are described by the word “acclaimed” would fade, but it hasn’t. 

What’s notable though, is that one else seems all that keen on being the next HBO these days—they’re all focused on the mass market—but it’s good to see that someone is holding the flame for that sort of TV, even if it isn’t widely popular.

Which is why it’s a very good thing that HBO now lives on Max as part of its mini-MVPD strategy, along with CNN and The Food Network and HGTV. Because it’s always been meant to be an option. Not the only option.

Hulu Is Going To See A Small Lift

The Bear is one of those shows that never seemed to get the sort of chattering class buzz that it deserved, but its massive Emmy triumph (and for Season One, no less!) is bound to spur a resurgence of interest in Hulu. Or it will, if they play their marketing cards right.

This is a good thing for Disney as they are merging Disney+ and Hulu, or at least toying with the idea—it gives them a chance to win a whole lot of viewers back.

Abbott Elementary Is The New This Is Us 

You know, the network TV show that manages to actually win awards. The industry always needs one of these shows to prove it’s not fully in the bag for streamers and that something good can still exist on old school network TV. Abbott is a well-done old-school sitcom, the sort of thing TV used to pump out on a regular basis. While it’s currently on ABC, it’s the sort of show that streaming services need to look to as a model if they’re planning to survive.

Those Reunions Are Going To Be A Tough Act To Follow

While it was wonderful revisiting old friends (and sobering to see how many of these stars, seemingly frozen in amber, had aged) I had three thoughts: how do you follow this up next year, does this mean anything to anyone under 35, and can TV ever become so central to the fabric of our culture again?

Next year will need to be something completely different, probably not a bad thing, as awards shows are not meant to be format shows, but for feels, this year is not going to be easy to beat.

As for Zoomers and younger Millennials, it’s hard to say. There are certainly enough opportunities to watch these shows in reruns, what between syndication and the FASTs. Still, I wonder how many know All In The Family (and why were Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers standing a good six feet away from each other?) or even The Facts of Life. 

It may not matter though, as this year was not meant for them. 

Which is not to say that a Saved By The Bell or iCarly reunion isn’t in the cards, it’s just that it may not resonate the same way.

Which is why I remain convinced that TV needs to try and become ubiquitous again, to double down on those long seasons and familiar sitcom rhythms.

It may not work—the Age of the Monoculture may be done and gone, yet another artifact of the midcentury Pax Americana. 

But it’s worth trying.

At least one more time.