But if your goal was to avoid insulted celebrities, social media outrage or petulant notes from the White House, you could have done no better than to hire Bargatze, a clean, calm, classical, noncontroversial, nonpolitical, very funny, very successful comedian. Bargatze, who has been in comedy since 2002, saw his career explode over the last few years; his appeal is not so much mainstream, which is to say soft-edged, as it is broad \u2014 something for everybody.<\/p>\n
The show opened quite brilliantly \u2014 perhaps confusingly, if you had missed Bargatze\u2019s \u201cWashington\u2019s Dream\u201d sketches on \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d on which the routine was closely modeled, including the presence of Mikey Day, Bowen Yang and James Austin Johnson \u2014 with the host as Philo T. Farnsworth, \u201cthe inventor of television,\u201d foreseeing the medium\u2019s less than sensible future. First presenter Stephen Colbert followed immediately to a standing ovation and chants of his name. \u201cWhile I have your attention, is anyone hiring? I have 200 very qualified candidates with me tonight who will be available in June.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Emmys host Nate Bargatze, right, and Bowen Yang appear in an opening sketch at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday. <\/p>\n
(Myung J. Chun \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
Then the host introduced his much publicized, one would say quintessentially Bargatzean, gimmick. To keep acceptance speeches short, he would donate $100,000 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America; $1,000 per second would be deducted for anyone going over the allotted 45 seconds. Money would be added to the pot for anyone running short. (J.B. Smoove, a former Boys Club member, was a sort of co-sponsor, in the audience with a young boy and girl.) This efficiency made professional sense, though it had the potential to put a lid on what is usually the most interesting, unruly, moving, unpredictable part of the show. (If anyone had thought for a second, it also spelled trouble: Try talking for what you imagine is 45 seconds. You will be wrong.)<\/p>\n
As it happened, the state of the world was addressed, sidelong and directly. Presenter Julianne Nicholson said of living in a post-apocalyptic bunker in \u201cParadise,\u201d \u201ccompared to headlines that\u2019s positively feel-good TV.\u201d Jeff Hiller, winning supporting actor in a comedy series for \u201cSomebody Somewhere,\u201d thanked the Duplass brothers \u201cfor writing a show of connection and love in this time when compassion is seen as a weakness.\u201d \u201cLast Week Tonight\u201d senior writer Daniel O\u2019Brien dedicated their second award to \u201call writers of political comedy while that is still a type of show that is allowed to exist.\u201d And in a generational echo of their \u201cHacks\u201d characters, fourth-time winner Jean Smart (who has won seven Emmys overall) ended her acceptance speech saying, \u201cLet\u2019s be good to each other, just be good to each other,\u201d while co-star and first-time winner Hannah Einbinder, finished with, \u201cI just want to say: Go Birds, f\u2014 ICE, and free Palestine.\u201d Going way over the 45-second limit, she promised to pay the difference on the tote board.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hannah Einbinder accepts the award for supporting actress in a comedy series for \u201cHacks\u201d during the show at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday.<\/p>\n
(Myung J. Chun \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
After Einbeinder, the most direct acknowledgment of current bad events came from Academy Chair and CEO Cris Abrego, speaking of the Governors Award given the week before to the Corp. for Public Broadcasting. In a highly quotable speech, he noted how \u201cCongress had voted to defund it and silence yet another cultural institution.\u201d He continued, \u201cIn a time when division dominates the headlines, storytelling still has the power to unite us \u2026 In times of cultural regression [it reminds] us what\u2019s at stake and what can still be achieved,\u201d and he rattled off a number of much loved shows that challenged the status quo. \u201cIn a moment like this, neutrality is not enough. … Culture does not come from the top down, it rises from the bottom up. \u2026 Let\u2019s make sure that culture is not a platform for the privileged but a public good for all.\u201d The stars in the audience nodded approvingly.<\/p>\n
There were also some pure delights among the bedrock of desultory scripted banter and unimpressive tributes to old shows (\u201cLaw & Order: SUV,\u201d \u201cThe Golden Girls\u201d). Reunited \u201cEverybody Loves Raymond\u201d co-stars Ray Romano and Brad Garrett, presenting the award for comedy series, recaptured the essence of their television brotherhood. Jennifer Coolidge, presenting the award for lead supporting actress in a comedy, sounded like she\u2019d walked in from a Christopher Guest film. \u201cBetween us, I was actually hoping to be nominated for you tonight for my work on this season of \u2018The Pitt.\u2019 I played a horny grandmother having a colonoscopy during a power outage and I had to play a lot of levels. I even had to do my own prep.\u201d She went on, after a while, to tell the nominees that winning \u201cis not all it\u2019s cracked up to be. It\u2019s really not\u2026 I thought I had gotten really close with my fellow nominees especially after I won but I\u2019m pretty sure they removed me from the group chat.\u201d<\/p>\n
The inevitable losses incurred by Bargatze\u2019s charity gimmick provided a sort of running joke at the host\u2019s expense, which he managed quite well, while some winners made a game of trying to put money back on the board. But the longer it went on, the more pressure it put on the winners to be short. Eventually, the show found its natural level, as winners said what they needed to, or much of it, and the count dropped tens of thousands of dollars past zero. For everyone but the bean counters, the least important thing about an awards show is it running on time; in any case, it was only a few minutes over.<\/p>\n
And, as one might have expected, Bargatze \u2014 who made it through the three hours in a way that served the event and his own down-home ethos \u2014 paid the originally promised $100,000 and added a $250,000 tip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There were two questions the 77th Emmy Awards, held Sunday night at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":228319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[40226,23781,123377,1582,276,1144,10754,2961,224,2444,5337,42702,5613,4370,99153,13895,399,6620,123378,83020],"class_list":{"0":"post-228318","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-audience","9":"tag-award","10":"tag-bargatze","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-comedy","14":"tag-host","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-los-angeles-times","18":"tag-losangeles","19":"tag-nate-bargatze","20":"tag-second","21":"tag-show","22":"tag-sort","23":"tag-stephen-colbert","24":"tag-television","25":"tag-time","26":"tag-tote-board","27":"tag-winner"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115207479290847310","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}