Emmys Need A Fast Fix?

[Roddy]

It takes just 15 seconds to see how badly the Emmys are broken.

That infamous quarter-of-a-minute is the entire length, give or take a second, of Ellen Burstyn's Emmy-nominated monologue in HBO's Mrs. Harris. Never mind that the appearance itself was less a performance than an inside joke/salute to Burstyn, who played Jean Harris in a 1981 TV movie (and picked up a much more deserved Emmy nomination for her trouble). The question is how anyone who watched HBO's movie could possibly have thought Burstyn's three-line cameo merited a nod.

The obvious answer is that they didn't watch the movie. Academy voters just saw a name they knew and respected and checked it off — a careless act that is, in the end, as insulting to Burstyn as it is to the other supporting actresses in miniseries and movies who had a better claim on a nomination.

Still, as embarrassing as it may be, Burstyn's 15 seconds of Emmy fame might be overlooked if it weren't the final ill wind in a perfect storm:

•A new nomination system was devised to allow panels to pick the major nominations (which did not include Burstyn's category). The result was a bizarre slate that was widely ridiculed for multiple, glaring omissions.

•A new late-August time slot was forced upon the academy by NBC, which sacrificed Emmy to serve its new masters at the National Football League. The result is almost certain to be bottom-rung ratings for a show that already lags behind its major award competitors.

In short, after years of effort, the TV industry has managed to create an awards show that no one trusts and most people won't watch. Give them another few years, and they might actually make the Emmys radioactive.

So why should viewers care? After all, like every entertainment award, the Emmys are as much a commercial creature as an artistic one. The broadcast and cable networks support them because they generate free publicity and Emmy-boasting promotions.

Yet for all their flaws, the Emmys are still the medium's most important public recognition of good work — and that should matter to any viewer who wants to see good work encouraged. The Emmy symbolizes the industry's commitment to quality, and if the symbol is allowed to deteriorate, so may the commitment.

The message sent by the current system is that TV does not take quality seriously. Even if that's true, it's not the message TV wants to be sending.

How to fix it? Here are five steps toward a better Emmy.

Change the nominating procedure

Scrapping the panels is a good start, but it can't be the finish. Yes, the volunteer panels that chose the nominees in the major categories left out House's Hugh Laurie, Earl's Jason Lee and Lost, among other grievous sins. But it was the voting membership itself, without interference from a panel, that stuck Emmy with the Mrs. Harris debacle.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter: The problem is not the method, it's the members — and no fix will work that doesn't keep that in mind.

The not-so-secret flaw in the Emmy procedures has always been that the people handing out the awards for excellence in television don't watch television, at least not when they work in television. They just don't have the time.

Time, of course, was less of an issue when there were only three networks, as there were when the Emmys began.

But the sheer volume of product these days, from broadcast and cable, has simply overwhelmed the system. And so too often, the voters fall back on the shows that garner the highest ratings or get the most publicity or run the best pre-Emmy campaign.

The academy's response has been to rely on tapes, which are selected by the producers and actors. Unfortunately, tapes can create as many problems as they solve.

As the nomination panels proved, it's hard to judge a complex series such as Lost on one episode alone — and hard to justify a system that would entrust a “best series” decision to anyone who has seen only one episode of such an obvious Emmy contender.

You can blame the Lost producers for not selecting a more accessible episode, as some have done, but that seems to make mastery of the Emmy system the prime goal. Do you want to give the Emmy to the producer who made the best show, or to the producer who made the best choice when it came time to submit a tape?

The truth is, members don't need tapes for the nominations. They need help. They will never have enough time to watch enough tapes to make an informed decision.

The solution is to create an awards committee that can temper the excesses of the voters. Let the members select a slate of nominees, and then let the committee correct the glaring errors by either substituting a name or, if that seems undemocratic, adding an extra name. A similar system seems to work quite well for the Grammys, so why shouldn't it work for the Emmys?

As for who should be on the committee, let the academy voters choose people in the industry whom they trust.

Believe me, with a few rare exceptions, network executives all know what's good on their air and what isn't.

They just won't admit it in public.

Change the membership

Go to any set of any television show and it's a safe bet that many of the people there aren't members of the academy. And the younger they are, the less likely it is that they've joined.

Here's a quick and easy fix: Give an automatic one-year membership to everyone who works on one of the 10 series nominated as the year's best. With any luck, some of those working artists will stay around. And even if they don't, at least they'll bring some new voices to the discussion for a year.

Clarify the mission

What exactly are the series Emmys supposed to be rewarding?

Look, for example, at the best actress in a drama category. You could very well argue that The West Wing's Allison Janney gave a stronger performance in the one episode she had to send to voters than The Closer's Kyra Sedgwick did in hers. But over the course of the season, Sedgwick had far more to do than Janney and was far more important to her show's success.

So what is that Emmy actually for: best performance in a single episode or best performance in the series as a whole? The question you choose determines the answer you get.

If the award is for best single episode, then sending just one episode to the membership — as nominees do now in the major acting categories — is fine. If it's for a series, however, more tapes need to be sent. Then we'll just have to hope the voters actually watch them.

Police the categories

Let's return to poor Burstyn, a wonderful actress who deserves better than to be the poster child for Emmy inanity. You can blame many people for her nomination — the folks who submitted her name, the members who voted for her, and the actress herself for not withdrawing.

But in the end, the fault lies with the academy, which should have a procedure in place to move actors into categories where they belong, and remove them if they don't belong anywhere.

For too many years, Emmy has allowed actors to category-shop, a process that generally involves floating in and out of the supporting categories at will.

I love Jon Cryer and I'm thrilled that he got a supporting actor nomination for Two and a Half Men — but if he's not a co-star in that show, they should change the Two in the title.

Treat the awards with more respect

First off, that means never allowing them to be shunted off to August again. The Emmys should be anchored in their traditional spot: the Sunday before the mid-September Monday that launches the season. Any network that is unwilling to stick to that schedule should lose its place in the rotation, football or no football.

Treating the awards with a little respect also means reminding the hosts that their job is to host the awards, not to mock them. A sense of occasion, please.

After all, if there's one thing the academy members have proved this year, it's that they can make a mockery of the Emmys all by themselves. No outside help is required.

*Is all of this necassary or is it too late to revamp the Emmys? I'm thinking it's way too late. More and more people do no take the Emmys seriously anymore. They pay more attention to the Guilds: Actors/Writers/Directors/Producers (SAG-WGA-DGA-PGA).