Emmys Given Sunday

Yes, I know it’s Monday night (or maybe later).

I’d hoped to “live-blog” during the Emmys but the Internet connection was down.
Still, I took notes, fleshed them out during commercials, and have since edited them into a review — in the spirit of Bests & Worsts or Cheers & Jeers, accompanied by certain exclamations I realized were recurring from my fingertips. So here, late and surely redundant to countless other postmortems in cyberspace, are my 2009
Emmys Yays, Heys, Hmms, & Huhs.

Hey! I’m just one letter off the Tetragrammaton.

The Opening

Yay! Neil Patrick Harris is already enjoyably smooth yet arch. It took me a few lines
to figure out that he was doing the faux-newsreel voiceover himself. And the white tux jacket is a bold yet winning choice.

I fall into the sliver of my generation who doesn’t have Doogie Howser nostalgia, by
the way. That series was on during my college years, when TV viewing was mostly limited to SNL, the news — just a few things going on like the Gulf War, the Clarence Thomas hearings, a couple of Presidential elections, the Rodney King riots, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union — and weekly indulgence in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I think the adult NPH is a real hoot, though, on How I
Met Your Mother and in general from what I’ve seen of him.

Hmm… The song was a bit wan at the outset. And it’s hard for one guy, not hoofing
it much (partly ’cause he’s singing live, I think, so points on that score), to roam a huge stage minus a visible band or backup dancers and not look small. He ended strong and that staccato rundown of the various channels rocked, but some backing vocals might have made it sound meatier.

Hey! Jon Hamm is a very handsome man.

Hmm… So who does have quality opening montages nowadays, theme-song or
not? I watch approximately two sitcoms, 30 Rock and HIMYM, both of which oddly enough feature quick titles with vocals but no words — good ones, too, although 30 Rock’s is best skipped if you’re viewing episodes in succession on DVD. I don’t follow Desperate Housewives any more, but its original credits sequence was imaginative
and nicely executed. The recently departed Battlestar Galactica had an excellent theme. Big Love and True Blood, which I catch up on via disc, use actual songs quite effectively. Mad Men’s opening probably gets the gold right now for its music and visuals; I wouldn’t think of fast-forwarding past.