2008 Emmys Flop: Is Reality to Blame?

This year's 60th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards Show boasted the lowest ratings for the Emmys since 1990. Nielsen Media Research found the ABC telecast averaged 12.2 million, down 6 percent from last year's broadcast and on par with record-low 12.3 million people who watched the 1990 Emmys. This was also the fourth straight year in viewer decline for the Emmys which begs the question: what's eating the Emmys?

Sunday Night Football, or more specifically the Dallas Cowboys versus Green Bay Packers, surely took a sizable bite out of the Emmys' audience. But should a once-a-year, star-studded, glamorous award show really loose all of their viewers to linebackers? It seems like something else was askew.

Some say, the broadcast was overly-focused on reality television and doomed from it's "unscripted" opening skit, seen on the left, during which reality television hosts Ryan Seacrest, Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum,Jeff Probst and Tom Bergeron talked about nothing for twelve straight minutes. "This is not a bit," Mandel said during the skit. "This is reality and who better to offer that to you?" But in fact, the reality was that the skit was met with a bored, if not stunned, audience and mocked just fifteen minutes into the show when Jeremy Piven accepted his Emmy. "What if I just kept talking for twelve minutes? what would happen? That was the opening," Piven joked.

Some critics felt the reality hosts were fully to blame for the show's dismal ratings. Without their glossy sets and their usual confinement to two-minute babble the hosts seemed out of their league. USA Today deemed the broadcast "hideously awful from start to harried finish, dragged down by five amateurish reality anchors who would have been unwelcome as guests, let alone host."

ABC chose to feature the quintet as hosts in order to introduce the Emmys' brand new reality host category in which all five hosts were nominated. Though each host is talented in the cocoon of his individual show, the chemistry between them was contrived and largely missing. Egos were soothed as each host seemed allotted just the same amount of time as the next and all the while I sat there wondering why ABC hadn't just chosen one host? The only possible hindrance being the fact that choosing one nominee would look like choosing the winner. So why not forget the reality television hosting gag altogether? I would kick all of them off my Emmy island. But it seems that at this year's Emmys, reality was king. Even Lauren Conrad of "The Hills", famous for starring as herself in a never-ending "reality" series, presented an Emmy Sunday night. Presenter standards must have been significantly lowered.

On the whole, the Emmys broadcast was as reality-saturated as television itself. From hosts to presenters to winners, reality presence was not wanting. But with all of the reality floating about I have to wonder, do the Emmys have nothing higher to honor than reality television? Are twelve million people tuning in to see reality rewarded? Has the television industry lost its talent? Or has American lost its interest in scripted television?

In classic award show style, ABC paid montage homage to scripted greats like the Mary Tyler Moore Show but this year's scripted television still failed to take center stage. As James Hibberd said, "It didn't help the Emmys that its big winners were the barely watched Mad Men, the slightly more watched John Adams and as Tina Fey joked, the Hulu-watched 30 Rock."

Bigger names like Grey's Anatomy, and Ugly Betty were noticeably absent from the winning line-up. Aside from Tina Fey's triple win, seen right, there was little excitement in the Emmy air. ABC news, who broadcasted the program, believes the small audience and lack of excitement about the winning shows is an ominous sign for TV's new season, which opens Monday. In the end, the winning shows seemed to be the shows with less-than-winning ratings. The lack of consistency left viewers befuddled and disconnected from the awards.

The discrepancy between ratings and winnings may be attributed to the taste of the chosen voters, but it also seemed to pay inadvertent homage to the 100 day writers strike last season. As the Associated Press remarked, "the shows that were able to continue show what TV without writers is like."Apparently, shows without writers equates to shows without ratings... but they still win Emmys. The writers strike not only drained the Emmy talent pool, it also largely deflated the television industry. Though the fumbling and lackluster performance of the reality hosts is surely responsible for some viewer disinterest, the real ratings issue came from America's lack of interest in TV altogether. Without shows to excite, hosts to entertain and speeches that last for more than 15 seconds there is no point in watching the Emmys. Reality can only take you so far and as a nation with a lot of issues of its own, America seems to be ready for some un-reality entertainment.