Game of Thrones:
The Heart of Emmys 2018
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Emmys 2018: Game of Thrones makes triumphant return on TV's biggest night. |
When the 2018 Emmy nominations were announced, it seemed like the comedy categories were far more interesting than the drama ones. And when it came time to guess the winners, we assumed things would be wilder on the comedy side, while the drama awards would either re-coronate Game of Thrones or continue last year’s Handmaid’s Tale steamroller.
Game of Thrones did win Outstanding Drama Series last night, along with Peter Dinklage’s third Emmy for playing Tyrion Lannister, but for the most part my prognostication was exactly backwards. On the comedy front, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel won nearly everything in sight, while the drama awards remained unpredictable throughout, even down to GoT reclaiming the Emmys Iron Throne.
Rarely has the opening of an awards show felt as inauspicious as the first 10 minutes or so of Monday night's Emmy Awards. An opening number called "We Solved It," making light of the idea that Hollywood's meager progress toward greater diversity constitutes a meaningful resolution to the issue, featured a number of appealing TV personalities: Saturday Night Live's Kenan Thompson and Kate McKinnon, Tituss Burgess of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Kristen Bell of The Good Place, RuPaul, Sterling K. Brown of This Is Us, and Ricky Martin. It even included what they called the One Of Each Dancers, a group that, taken together, supposedly checked every demographic box. It worked better in theory than in execution: the song wasn't great, and the number seemed a little sloppy, like they'd all just learned it. Regrettably, it got worse before it got better.
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| The television academy did manage to spread the love in the drama categories, awarding The Americans for its writing and lead actor (Matthew Rhys), The Crown for directing and lead actress (Claire Foy), Peter Dinklage for his supporting work in Game of Thrones, and Thandie Newtonfor her role in Westworld. “I don’t even believe in God but I’m going to thank her tonight,” said Newton, who plays the robot mutineer Maeve Millay in HBO’s sci-fi hit. |
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Especially in the first half of the show, a pall hung over the ceremony as if much of the crowd had been heavily sedated. Jeff Daniels rambled about his horse and people chuckled politely. Aidy Bryant and Bob Odenkirk — both known to be funny people! — haltingly executed a bit of scripted patter about doing scripted patter, a gambit that's been taking down presenters for ages. (This never works. Stop doing this.) Speech after speech seemed dragged down by the energy around it. It's not that there were no successes at all among the presenters; Michael Douglas was very funny talking about the deep resentment he believes in carrying around about the awards you've lost.
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'Game Of Thrones' And 'Mrs. Maisel' Soar While The Hosts Struggle.
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But it didn't help that the first two award-winners of the night were probably the most energetic ones to hit the stage for quite a while. Henry Winkler, honored for his supporting work in Barry and receiving the first Primetime Emmy Award of his long career, was just as charming as you'd hope, and just as excited, saying he only had 37 seconds for a speech he'd been holding for 43 years. And Alex Borstein, who won in the supporting category for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, started by announcing she wasn't wearing a bra and asking other women not to pee on the seats of public toilets. It might not have been a traditional awards speech, but it had a certain verve.
Others were just fine: Rachel Brosnahan won for her leading performance in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and encouraged everyone to vote in the midterms, and Bill Hader won for his leading performance in Barry and seemed genuinely shocked. Actor Darren Criss and director Ryan Murphy both won for The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, part of the ACS anthology series that picked up a bunch of awards for its previous season about the O.J. Simpson trial. Peter Dinklage won in the supporting category for Game of Thrones, as he has twice before. Things rolled along.
But on an awards ceremony that started off trying to do edgy humor about the limits of progress toward diversity, it was hard not to notice that it took quite a while to get to the first nonwhite winner in an acting category: Regina King for the Netflix limited series Seven Seconds, which will not return for a second season (as many "limited" series, in fact, do). Thandie Newton also won in the supporting actress in a drama series category for Westworld, but some of the actors of color for whom hopes were highest — Sandra Oh in Killing Eve, for instance — they didn't come to pass.
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A wedding proposal was just one of the highlights of Monday's telecast |
But perhaps the most heartwarming moment of the ceremony came when Glenn Weiss, honored for directing the 2018 Oscars broadcast, used his acceptance speech to recognize his mother, who recently passed away. Weiss then proposed to his girlfriend, Jan Svendsen, who sat in the crowd unassumingly before taking to the stage as Weiss got on one knee. “You wonder why I don’t call you my girlfriend?” he asked as the crowd cheered him on. “It’s because I want to call you my wife.”
Elsewhere, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver won outstanding variety talk series for a third consecutive year. RuPaul’s Drag Race, in its 10th season, was finally recognized by the Academy for outstanding reality competition program, leading to the evening’s most rousing acceptance speech. “Listen, if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” said RuPaul, surrounded by castmates and crew. “Can I get an amen in here?”
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