Emmys host (and Emmy winner) Mariska Hargitay.
Photo by Miller Mobley/NBC
There’s often a tension in televised awards shows between celebrating the winners of individual honors — often embodied by not playing a winner off if their acceptance speech goes a few seconds long — and celebrating the subject of the awards (movies, TV, music, whatever) as a whole. It varies from awards show to awards show and year to year within a given academy’s honors.
Last year’s Emmys were bad at both, with a host (Nate Bargatze) who, other than having made a few stand-up specials, had no real connections to the TV business and a spectacularly ill-advised running bit involving a donation fund to the Boys and Girls Club that would get drained every time a winner’s speech ran long.
How this year’s Emmy telecast plays out remains to be seen, but the host — Mariska Hargitay — is about as big a TV star as there is, having been on every single season of the longest-running primetime drama in American history, Law & Order: SVU. The telecast might also have a little more breathing room, since the TV Academy moved a few awards that are normally part of the main show to last week’s Creative Arts awards.
Whether NBC and the academy use that extra time well is the big open question. Hargitay (who won two Emmys this year for her HBO documentary My Mom Jayne) has charisma for days and can be very funny — certainly a hell of a lot more so than Olivia Benson — and I think she’ll do fine. The Emmys have the same producers (Jesse Collins Entertainment) as last year’s mess of a show, but that company was also behind better-received editions of the awards the previous two years.
The Emmys are part of a pretty busy week that also features the premiere of a handful of network shows and a fairly heavy streaming schedule, signaling the fall TV rush is starting.
The calendar for this week is below. All times are ET/PT unless noted.