An inconvenient truth
It's time for a big musical number at the 2007 Emmy Awards, but who's that with the pudgy tummy, the arthritic zombie dance moves, the lackluster vocals? Are the pre-show rumors about Britney showing up to apologize for her notorious VMA performance actually bearing fruit?
Oh, sorry, false alarm, it's just Tony Bennett. Sadly, his voice has seen better centuries, and pairing him with Christina Aguilera is just cruel. His vocals sound talky, scratchy, a step too slow; hers are rich, soulful, expertly modulated. It's like a flea fart going up against a tornado.
Nonetheless, the vintage crooner still looks great in a tux, the planet's hippest senior citizen outside of TV itself. And no doubt his presence is a bittersweet but somehow comforting reminder of the way things used to be, when true talent could fuel careers measured in decades, not Nielsen weeks.
Alas, true talent is a guarantee of nothing these days, which perhaps is why the Emmy's producers decided to stage the show in the round this year. For those watching at home, there was no discernible payoff to this decision. For those at the event, it simply ruined their view for much of the night.
But if there was no great practical purpose for the Emmy's in-the-round approach, it was, like the appearance of Tony Bennett, symbolically significant, an homage to that glorious era when TV was the brightest star in the sky and it didn't matter what it dumped into our living rooms -- it was always the center of attention, the center of the universe, in fact, with everything else just orbiting around it. In that era, it didn't matter if you had one of the crappy seats; even just catching a glimpse of Kelsey Grammer's bald spot was glamourous.
Now, of course, most major network stars are about as recognizable as the average blogger, and there's no antidote in sight. Which is why it was such a poignant moment when Al Gore received a standing ovation while accepting an award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive TV.
No doubt many of the stars in the audience have never heard of Current TV, and simply figured Gore was there to collect an Emmy for some climate change miniseries they'd failed to catch. Even after he helpfully explained that the purpose of his cable channel was to "open up the television medium" so that viewers can "reclaim democracy" from the likes of Charlie Sheen and James Gandolfini, they continued to applaud anyway, like bison showering Buffalo Bill Cody with adulation.
Later, when the democracy reclaimers of Amazing Race swarmed the stage to collect an Emmy for Outstanding Reality-competition Program, the audience response was much less enthusiastic, but the Racers didn't seem to mind much. There were dozens and dozens of them; they were more numerous than the cast of The Sopranos, but unlike the cast of The Sopranos, they weren't there for a swan song. They'd won four times already; they'll probably win again. Not one of them can sing like Tony Bennett used to be able to sing, one imagines, but that doesn't matter. The future belongs to them and Al Gore.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]