Today's Evil Beet Gossip

Emmys Announcements Result in Unnecessary Shock and Awe

Melissa McCarthy and Joshua Jackson announce the 63rd Primetime Emmy Awards nominations

Reactions to this year’s Emmy nominations have run the gamut, from surprised delight to shocked indignation, from shocked bemusement to surprised consternation. Everyone is, in a word, dismayed. (Full lists of the 2011 nominees are over here.)

Here is a roundup of all the Shock, Delight, and Ire accumulated over the past couple days:

The Nice

Bridesmaids’ scene-stealing Melissa McCarthy had been announcing the Emmy nominations live when she realized she herself was nominated as Outstanding Lead Actress for her role in CBS’s sitcom Mike and Molly. “I could not have been more shocked,” she said. Also: “I was like, ‘I hope I don’t wet my pants.'”

– The LA Times describes this year’s myriad surprises as “both heartening and irritating.” Among the nicest surprises: hard-won noms for Martha Plimpton, Joan Cusack, and Kristen Wiig. The LA Times also underscores that returning nominee Steve Carell has incredibly never won an Emmy for his work on The Office.

Jeremy Davies, who easily slips into my Top Twenty Favorite Oddballs (and, like Vincent D’Onofrio, he’s becoming more and more visibly neurotic with age), had this weird thing to say about his Outstanding Guest Actor nomination for Justified:

For a misfit like me to somehow get away with stealing an Emmy nomination, it’s a strangely delicious collision between feeling honor-bound to my community to properly report the self-evident robbery that I feel my blasphemous nomination constitutes, and a feeling of re-inventing the physics of flight.”

– Also, a lot of nice stories about actors being unexpectedly jarred awake by phone calls from well-wishers. Matt LeBlanc, on his Episodes nomination (and I can so hear this in a Joey Tribbiani voice):

My mother’s in town. The phone started ringing at 5:30, and she came upstairs in her pajamas. She thought it was like an earthquake or something.

– Unexpectedly, comedian Louis C.K. was nominated for four Emmys, and he is as startled as anyone. “I was expecting to be disappointed,” he’s admitted.

Other never-before-nominated nominees included Timothy Olyphant of Justified (whaaaat? No nod for Deadwood? Ever? Really?), Johnny Galecki of Big Bang Theory, and Steve Buscemi of Boardwalk Empire.

The Not-So-Nice

Left out in the cold this year: The Closer‘s Kyra Sedgwick, whose run on TNT is about to end, along with AMC’s damned good The Walking Dead. Plus, no Outstanding Drama nom for The Borgias, which stars Jeremy Irons.

– As I read TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s “The Emmys’ Most Glaring Omissions,” I pictured cartoon-steam puffing out each side of his head. What happened to Southland, Treme, Justified, and The Borgias for Outstanding Drama? he wants to know. And NBC’s Community for Outstanding Comedy? And Alison Brie, “the most winningly uptight woman on television”? And what about Sean Bean? SEAN BEAN. I have to agree with you there, Matt.

– Reuters decided to go with the jarring headline “Young plus skinny = hot? Think again, say Emmy voters”. Reuters is shocked—shocked!—that old ladies like Cloris Leachman and Betty White, along with younger gals like Melissa McCarthy and “curvy” Christina Hendricks, have been nominated this year in lieu of younger, thinner television stars.

– Now, I don’t doubt that Reuters’ reporter meant the aforementioned article in the nicest way possible, but sheesh. I filed it down here, under “not-so-nice,” because, seriously, Reuters? Shut up. (Cloris Leachman holds the all-time Primetime Emmy record with a total eight wins, plus one Daytime trophy, so why is her nomination this year so amazing? Oh, because she’s 85 years old, OK.)

– The creator of the totally-snubbed Sons of Anarchy shared other critics’ indignation, evidently, because he went apeballs on Twitter. “If my mom and dad were alive, this Emmy snub would kill them,” he tweeted. “That’s not true,” he continued, “they were too old to understand my show. Just like the Academy.” Zing?

And there you have it: the entire spectrum of responses to the Emmy nominations, from outrage to stunned happiness, to abject horror. Weird.

3 CommentsLeave a comment

  • welllllllllllllllllllllllll…!WELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL! SUMMMER ! HEAT””EMMYS”””HAS ANCCUMENT”‘FOR US

  • I was bummed that Denis O’Hare was overlooked as Russell Edgington on the last season of True Blood. He was outstanding in a kind of mediocre season.