Every Emmy telecast is about two kinds of shows. In one corner, you have the shows being celebrated as they receive awards. In the other corner, you have the Emmy telecast itself, which is meant to be a celebration of those shows. In some years, the two kinds of shows meld together beautifully. In others, the nature of one doesn’t feel in harmony with the other.
And on catastrophic nights like the 2025 Emmys ceremony, it feels like the two groups were designed to be complete spiritual opposites.
Though the results largely continued the recent Emmys trend of one or two shows dominating each genre — this year, it was Adolescence for the limited categories and The Studio for the comedy ones — it was a year with lots of first-time winners, and the wealth was shared enough in the drama category that pretty much every constituency had something to come away from the night feeling happy about. And for the most part, the winners were either being honored for approaching their subjects with great compassion and empathy, or they at least demonstrated those traits when they came to the stage to collect their trophies. On the former group, for instance, there was Somebody Somewhere co-star Jeff Hiller, stunned and visibly shaking with emotion from his surprise win for his funny and deeply poignant work on the lovely and underseen HBO comedy. In the latter group, there was Tramell Tillman’s moving speech about his mother being his first acting coach, after he won the drama supporting actor award for playing menacing Severance manager Seth Milchick.
And then in the middle of this, there was the show’s host, Nate Bargatze, and his producing team, who at best seemed confused about why anybody watching at home should care about any of this, and at worst radiated absolute contempt for the whole thing.
The telecast opened with a TV-themed riff on Bargatze’s George Washington sketch from SNL, this time casting him as television’s inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth, telling his assistants about all the things that the medium might become in 100 years. Unfortunately, most of the jokes in it felt between 10 to 15 years old, including ones about how there’s no learning on the Learning Channel and how nobody in Hollywood knows what a producer does. But that warmed-over comedy was still vastly preferable to what came after, with an inept, mean-spirited running gag that dominated and derailed the entire show.
Bargatze returned a few minutes later to admit that lots of people were wondering why he was hosting, and it became clearer and clearer throughout the night that he was one of those people. He got names wrong — right before a reunion of Gilmore Girls stars Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel, he called the show “Gilmores Now” — and seemed generally dismissive of the very idea of being excited about any of this. He noted that each winner was allotted 45 seconds for their acceptance speeches, and suggested that they save the rest for social media, since, “More people are going to see it there anyway.” There’s a way to tell that joke without coming across like the entire event the audience is watching is a waste of time — basically, what Steve Martin has pulled off whenever someone has roped him into hosting the Oscars — but Bargatze didn’t manage to find it.
Worse, he and the producers then introduced their great running gag — for much of the night, the only gag Bargatze was involved in. He explained that he would be donating $100,000 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, but with a catch: For every second that each winner went over their allotted time, he would deduct $1,000 from that donation. Though he also promised to add $1,000 for every second a speech finished under 45, the tone and theme were set. Bargatze, and the show, were actively rooting against people expressing joy at having won these awards, and they wanted the audience to root against them, too.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
Even if you understood that in the end, Bargatze and CBS weren’t going to stiff a charity — that they would do something more or less like what actually happened, where the ultimate donation more than tripled, to $350,000 — the fact that Bargatze kept bringing it up just sucked all the energy out of the telecast. To make matters worse, the producers began disrupting acceptance speeches by showing a tally of how much money was being lost as the seconds ticked away — and did it in a way that the winners could see while they were trying to talk. Hacks co-star Hannah Einbinder offered to pay the difference when she won her first Emmy, and The Penguin scene-stealer Cristin Milioti eventually powered through her own speech, telling the crowd, “I love you, and I love acting so much!” But both were clearly rattled, in what was supposed to be a crowning moment in their respective careers. It was somehow infinitely more disrespectful than just having the orchestra start playing mid-speech to encourage people to get off the stage.
You could argue that awards telecasts are bloated, speeches can be self-indulgent, and something needs to be done to staunch the bleeding of viewers from one year to the next. You would be wrong on pretty much all counts, though. First, even when the total dipped to negative $26,000, that still meant that the winners had combined to only go a few minutes over all of their allotted time. The speeches are not the reason these shows feel bloated. It’s all the presenter banter that goes over like a lead balloon, all the nonwinners who are allowed to ramble — even if, on rare occasions like when Jennifer Coolidge is onstage, it’s funny rambling(*) — or when the host keeps coming out to talk about a running gag that grew less funny with each passing microsecond.
(*) When it’s Brad Garrett, it’s excruciating rambling, despite the best efforts of his former Everybody Loves Raymond co-star Ray Romano.
Second, those viewers who left ain’t coming back, under any circumstances. This is just the way TV viewership has gone. The Emmys were a relatively big deal in the days when network TV was a largely captive audience. But pretty much all live TV outside of sports has been in a tailspin for years now. The only people who are still watching the Emmys live are doing it because they like watching awards shows. They like seeing who wins and loses. They like hearing speeches. There’s nobody hate-watching, because a) who has the time, and b) there are far better hate-watching options available to stream every second of the day. The Emmy audience is entirely self-selecting in favor of positivity. Alienating them, as well as the people onstage(*), is cutting off your nose to spite your face, but only if your face already consisted entirely of that nose.
(*) For what it’s worth, I asked several people who were in the theater Sunday night about the running gag. Their responses suggested it played better in the room than at home — even when John Oliver got bleeped for saying, “Fuck you, Nate Bargatze,” his tone was more genial teasing rather than righteous indignation — though none of them liked that the shrinking tally appeared during speeches.
The entire thing felt like an act of self-sabotage. When Elizabeth Banks came out to present the award for directing of a limited series, someone had the bright idea to make her introductory patter all about an unusual aspect of the category that year: All but one of the nominees was a woman. In theory, it’s a nice point to make, especially from an actress who has doubled as a successful director herself. The problem is that everyone and their mother has known since the nominations came out that the winner for the category was going to be the one guy, Philip Barantini, for the impressive technical feat of filming an Adolescence episode in a single unbroken take. When he won, it made him look bad for defying what had been framed as a moment for female empowerment, and it made Banks look bad for undercutting the eventual winner. It was either an obvious unforced error from a production team that, like its host, seemed unprepared for most everything. That, or they wanted the audience to feel bad about the experience.
The night’s best moments often felt as if they were coming as small acts of rebellion against the telecast. When Stephen Colbert came out after the Philo T. Farnsworth sketch to present the night’s first award, he was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation and the crowd chanting his name. The crowd was even more boisterous and adoring when The Late Show With Stephen Colbert won its first Emmy for best talk show — a category that’s been dominated for years by Oliver’s Last Week Tonight and various incarnations of The Daily Show — celebrating Colbert’s victory on a show being broadcast by the very network that had recently fired Colbert to kiss up to the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave(*).
(*) Where Elizabeth Banks was put in a position to appear blindsided by the Adolescence win, Bryan Cranston clearly understood what was coming when he presented the talk show award, pausing to let the crowd go wild at the mention of Colbert.
And Bargatze even tried to dump all over that, pointing out the aforementioned negative $26,000 total, then quipping, “Stephen Colbert is happy, but he doesn’t have a job. It’s just tough.”
Does Bargatze actually hate Colbert, the television industry, and/or awards shows? Almost certainly not. Maybe he doesn’t quite understand the big deal about some or all of them, but he doesn’t seem like he cares enough about any of it to feel genuine hate. Yet between his apparent lack of preparation and the wildly ill-conceived, clunkily-executed running gag, he came across at times like he was annoyed he had been handed the job and was determined to make the experience as unpleasant for the audience as it was for him.
We could talk about some of the other results of the night. The Bear, once a darling of the Emmy voters, was completely shut out. Between Sunday’s show and last week’s Creative Arts Emmys, former juggernaut The White Lotus won a single category, for theme music. The voters were largely interested in new things, though Einbinder’s co-star Jean Smart seems to have a stranglehold on the lead comedy actress category until Hacks ends — which Einbinder said on the red carpet would be after the next season.
For a while, it seemed like there was a duel in the drama categories between The Pitt, a throwback to classic network TV medical procedurals, but with the polish of a modern drama; and Severance, avatar of the cinematic, intensely serialized streaming era. Both had early wins: Katherine LaNasa for her work as a wise veteran Pitt nurse, Tillman for his soft-spoken threats, and his Severance co-star Britt Lower for embodying the most extreme case of that show’s concept of your work self being different from your personal self. But the shows weren’t in direct competition in any of those categories. Then things went off-track for a bit. Slow Horses was an unlikely winner for drama directing, while Andor won a writing award for the episode with Mon Mothma’s speech. Perhaps there was some vote-splitting at work — the directing category had two nominees apiece from Pitt and Severance — or perhaps voters just like both of the other shows. (Slow Horses won a writing award last year, and that Andor episode was arguably the peak of one of the best shows of the last several years.) When Pitt star Noah Wyle beat his Severance counterpart Adam Scott for the drama lead actor category, though, it became clear that this would ultimately be the hospital drama’s night, and it was. I’ve been calling The Pitt the show of the year, and the Emmy voters ultimately agreed.
Ordinarily, that win would be the end of the night. But the Boys & Girls Clubs matter had to be resolved, which meant Bargatze coming out and explaining that of course they were never going to short a charity just for the sake of a dumb joke. Obviously, the show had to pay off the bit — literally and figuratively — but it meant that the Emmys once again seemed far more excited about everything but, you know, the actual practice of giving people awards and letting them talk about that.
The Pitt, The Studio, and Adolescence are three of the best things we’ve had on TV in 2025. Jeff Hiller’s performance on Somebody Somewhere was a miracle. Milioti’s work on The Penguin (a show I otherwise had little use for) was another gem in a career that’s been full of them. While there might have been a category here and there where I would have chosen a different winner, there were no results that angered me. Usually, that’s a big win for an awards show. Except in cases where the awards show itself is this rage-inducing.
From Rolling Stone US
