Techtite.com Editorial : My Two Bits, V2

As I write this, the 56th Annual Emmy Awards Show is long gone. The winners? Try winner: HBO. There was Sex and the City, then Sopranos, then Sopranos again, then SATC again, then Angels in America --several, several times-- then...oh, heck; how about Arrested Development as Best Comedy, only to...nope, let's give Best Drama to Sopranos. Out of any number of nominations, HBO got the best of them.

I'm not saying the above winners weren't deserved. I've been a subscriber to HBO since sometime around 1984. I've seen many of their shows get the shaft, while the four major networks cruise-control their way through a season, only to get the Emmys anyway. Many older HBO shows got the short end of the stick for all the wrong reasons, and now, the reverse is true. Perhaps that's half the problem.

Here's the other half: HBO is a premium channel. Things would be a lot different if HBO was a legitimate network, which even under a premium price, would be worth it. It isn't; it's a premium "movie channel," where your monthly subscription is for maybe (rough estimate here) around three hours of fresh programming a week, with the remaining (do the math) 165 hours each week devoted to either reruns of the exact same "new" programming, or worse yet, reruns of a film that was already in theaters, already on store shelves, and already for rent at the local Blockbuster store. Even if you gave HBO 200 Emmys, the nominees still amount to all of one new film, and about three Emmy-quality shows...one of which, Sex and the City, is now over. Emmy is basically implying that in order to watch the "best" shows on TV, we must pay premium prices, throughout 12 months in the year, for a station that only shows fresh programming, at its best, 3 hours a day.

The bigger problem: Emmy is right. HBO does offer better comedies and dramas than commercial networks lately. Let's start with what made Sex and the City better than most sitcoms. Was it the nudity and language? Partially, but only to a point (honestly; how much more conversation-worthy would any sitcom be, if the lead cast was frequently nude?). No; the real sales value of the series was how it was unlike the tired, saccharine, rubber-stamp sitcom formula seen everywhere else. Just about every sitcom these days is with an idiot husband, a brilliant wife, their totally cool teenage daughter, and their little dweeb son. Do I have to waste the bandwidth to list all the shows out there that are exact clones to this overdone sitcom plot? Even a cutting-edge, computer-animated "sitcom" like Father of the Pride is nothing more than another idiot-men/brilliant-women cliché. Enough.

I personally don't think the problems with either dramas or comedies are sex and language, but hey; if that's the problem, bring it. Any drama airing from 10:00 or later should feel perfectly free to be PG-13. Please: don't give me the "think of the children" tirade, especially when the majority of people who'd be saying "think of the children" have a cigarette in one hand and a baby in the other. Don't even get me started that a crime drama like CSI can air one hour earlier, and show "children" such fully animated sights as a heart exploding, or a skull being fractured. "Think of the children" my Aunt Fanny.

Language and nudity doesn't sell a series, though; imagination and originality does. Sure, I Dream of Jeannie was silly, but how imaginative a concept was it, to have a sitcom about an astronaut who finds a genie in a bottle? Likewise for ALF; silly, yes, though still quite imaginative. Then there are the dramas, where yes, this Trekker fan must throw a bone to the classic Star Trek. Were you aware that the original Trek series was the first to air an interracial kiss, when one such storyline required it? I'm just saying: commercial television used to be more daring at best, and even at its worst, it was pretty darn imaginative.

Which brings us full circle to why HBO shows get the Emmys: ingenuity. Sopranos was ingenious with its concept of a mob kingpin trying to deal with his real family life at the same time. Sex and the City was unique, in that four 30-something women were the lead stars, not a band of high school teenyboppers, nor a dysfunctional family that's too dysfunctional for anyone to care about them. The ingenuity even passes on to the networks' other new programming, as well. Why was Angels in America such an Emmy grabber? Simple: the scene when Emma Thompson in full angelic regalia appears with the music swelling in the background. Is there any scene on commercial TV, in all of last season, which was as eye-catching as that one?

Commercial networks hardly need premium subscribers, nor even the ability to air R-rated nudity and gore. All they need is to get back that spark of imagination and creativity. Drop that script about yet another fat dumb husband next to his brilliant wife, and look instead at that other sitcom, that someone in the office calls "silly" or "outrageous." Yeah; give us that sitcom please. The alternative is to go to another Emmy show, where HBO carries away all the awards in a wheelbarrow. There's no reason why a commercial network, with the proper imagination and spunk, can't go home with all the Emmys next year. Make it happen.

Agree? Disagree?

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Why "Emmy" Keeps Going to HBO