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The 2020 Emmys are not your typical Emmys, because nothing in the year 2020 is typical. The live, remotely produced awards show embraced the chaos, though, with host Jimmy Kimmel jokingly questioning why the Emmys were even happening at all this year. Kimmel, hosting the Emmys for the third time, spent much of his opening monologue trying to explain and justify why the Emmys were happening in a year of the pandemic and political unrest and unceasing darkness. And he wasn't really successful.
After getting the greeting out of the way, he got right to it: "The big question that I guess we should answer is, why would you have an awards show in the middle of a pandemic? No, seriously, I'm asking. Why are we having an award show in the middle of a pandemic? What the hell am I doing here? This is the year they decide they have to have a host?"
"'Why?' is a question I've been asked a lot this week," he continued. "And again, yeah, it might seem frivolous and unnecessary to do this during a global pandemic. But you know what else seems frivolous and unnecessary? Doing it every other year."
"What's happening tonight is not important. It's not going to stop COVID, it's not gonna put out the fires, but it's fun. And right now we need fun. My God do we need fun. This has been a miserable year. It's been a year of division, injustice, Zoom school, disaster, and death. We've been quarantined, in lockdown. We've been confined to our homes like prisoners in a dark and lonely tunnel. And what did we find in that dark and lonely cuddle? I'll tell you what we found: A friend that's there for us 24 hours a day. Our old pal television. That's right. Television is your friend. It's your Friends. It's your Big Brother, your Sister Sister, your Mama's Family, your Two Dads, your Three Sons, your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It's even your Dog, the Bounty Hunter. Through the Good Times and the Breaking Bads, for every day of your 600-lb Life. Television is there for you."
It was an unconvincing argument. It came off hollow and kind of glib. If not even Jimmy Kimmel, the host and executive producer of the show, can make a compelling case for why this awards show should exist right now, maybe having the show was a mistake. That list of miserable things that have happened this year is pretty dispiriting. On his late-night show, Kimmel has done a good job of providing laughs and moral clarity. He didn't do that in his opening monologue tonight. No one is better suited for this job than Kimmel, who presided over the most disastrous award show moment of all time a couple of years ago, and not even he could get jokes off that made this opening feel worthwhile.
The early minutes of his monologue were intercut with reaction shots to a "celebrity audience" pulled from footage from other awards shows, with a cloying laugh track. He took so long to acknowledge it that by the time the show actually showed the mostly empty Staples Center he was actually performing in, it had started to feel like the show was actually trying to pretend it was real. Then a bit with Jason Bateman where Bateman wasn't supposed to be there fell flat. It wouldn't have been funny in front of a live audience, and the silent room made it flop even harder.
He ended the monologue by going backstage and explained how everything was happening, showing the hundred-plus livestreams to nominees. These Emmys are an undeniably impressive technical undertaking, even if they admittedly feel less important than usual. It's time to consider the possibility that society has progressed beyond the need for awards shows. Just post the winners on Instagram.