After two consecutive ceremonies shaped by the pandemic, the Primetime Emmys returned to what felt more or less like a pre-Covid
format on Monday night. The awards were handed out in the celebrity-stuffed Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, and the corny bits were about TV clichés
The show remained fixated on a milder existential threat, however: streaming services. The theme remained dominant even though the ceremony
ran on Peacock as well as NBC, with the host, Kenan Thompson, working multiple Netflix digs into his monologue.
“For one more year,” The Times’s Mike Hale wrote in his review of the telecast, “we got the weird spectacle of broadcast TV nervously proclaiming
Along the way, there was the usual array of leaden gags, shameless commercialism and genuinely poignant moments that transcended all the award-show contrivance.
There was also, in the success of series like “Abbott Elementary,” evidence that the broadcasters still have some Emmy relevance left in them
even as prestige cable and streaming services claimed the biggest prizes. JEREMY EGNER