The Michael J. Fox Tribute, Mariska Hargitay Singing, and Other Highs and Lows From an Ungainly, Ill-Flowing Emmys Telecast

If you’re producing an awards show and you’re running short as you head into the final category of the evening — this is a thing that has never happened before, so it’s a strange hypothetical — it must be a blessing to have Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as your last presenters.

The longtime pals, collaborators and possible siblings have an undeniable rapport and a total lack of shame. So if you tell them, “Go out there and vamp,” they’re more than capable of babbling incoherently for five or 10 minutes, and there’s almost no risk that they’re going to wake up in the morning and feel any regrets or have any memories of what they said.

Actually, I have no memory of what McConaughey and Harrelson said either. I think they set up the premise of their upcoming Apple TV comedy Brothers?

I was too busy pondering how an awards telecast in 2026 could possibly fail to fill a three-hour programming block, as I flashed back to choices like moving several not-insignificant awards — acting prizes for David Harbour and Linda Cardellini, mostly — to the Creative Arts Emmys last weekend and the bizarre decision to start playing Lead Actress in a Drama winner Rhea Seehorn off when her speech threatened to go a few seconds long.

Look, there were things I loved in Monday’s NBC broadcast of the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards. But if your show concludes five minutes early with Mariska Hargitay standing around awkwardly, and that’s despite giving Hargitay not one, but two musical numbers, plus a seemingly endless filmed sketch (eventually featuring a game Taylor Swift), plus an extended tribute to Dolly Parton that somehow managed to exclude mention of anything Dolly did on television in a career that actually featured a lot of work on the small screen … something very, very strange has occurred.

Normally I don’t seek out the post-mortem “victory lap” interviews that award show producers do in publications like ours, but things happened behind the scenes of Monday’s telecast and I’ll be very curious if there are clear answers on what went askew — I’m hesitant to say “wrong,” though it clearly wasn’t “right” — with the telecast.

It was an ungainly and ill-flowing night.

I came into the show invested in three potential winners: Kate O’Flynn for supporting actress in a comedy, Rhea Seehorn for lead actress in a drama (even though Pluribus is a dark comedy) and Harrison Ford for supporting actor in a comedy. By 42 minutes into the telecast, all three categories had been presented, with the first two winning and Ford losing to Stephen Root as part of the Widow’s Bay juggernaut. It’s the second straight year that Ford has lost an Emmy that, in my opinion, he deserved to win, which would normally make me grouchy except that Root is a national treasure and should have won an Emmy for NewsRadio and Jeff Hiller is well and truly beloved in the creative community for good reason.

By 90 minutes in, almost all the awards had been presented. Somebody made the choice in structuring the telecast that the first half of the show would be awards and speeches (under the threat of truncation, though only Seehorn was impacted) and the second half would be tributes, memorials and other stuff to make people cry.

Was the assumption that the tributes would go longer? That the standing ovations would be more extended? Were there comic bits that got cut? Additional tributes that got trimmed? Somehow, the show simply got away from the producers and they were left with Harrelson and McConaughey giving an accurate simulation of what it would be like to be sober and sitting in the corner of their porch watching them riff. The audience in the theater was either amused or confused, but at that point, who could say for sure? I don’t know if there was a stage manager off to the side giving them the, “Keep on spinning!” signal or if whoever occupied that capacity had surrendered and gone to an afterparty already.

Positive guy that I am, I want to offer some praise before I return to scratching my head.

I loved the tribute to Michael J. Fox, winner of the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award.

I will never understand why the Academy Awards decided that the lifetime achievement awards should be given in some obscure secondary ceremony rather than as a centerpiece of the main telecast. These shows are the industry patting itself on the back; why would that not include annual celebrations of industry legends, front and center?

The extended standing ovation for Fox, whose clip package leaned heavily and inexplicably into his film work, is what a back-patting ceremony should be about. You can’t undersell the significance of Fox’s career in television and the significance of Fox to the multiple generations who grew up alongside him and entertained by him, but it would be just as wrong to undersell the significance of Fox’s appearance in terms of Parkinson’s visibility and disability awareness. Putting that man — on the “Nobody can say a single bad thing about them” Mt. Rushmore along with the likes of Betty White and Dolly Parton — in that spotlight and on as many televisions as were still on was important and powerful, and I do not get why every single award show doesn’t have a comparable moment.

The Emmys tried to shoehorn several of those moments into the telecast, with uneven results.

David Boreanaz and Sarah Michelle Gellar were on-hand to subtly chide Hulu for not picking up the Buffy the Vampire spinoff, obliquely mention the recent deaths of several Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast members (but not Buffy producer Dolly Parton) and ostensibly celebrate the show’s 30th anniversary. But with no clips and only two cast members, it wasn’t much of a reunion. And the show’s 30th anniversary is next year anyway.

Jaclyn Smith, Cheryl Ladd and Kate Jackson showed up to acknowledge the 50th anniversary of Charlie’s Angels, but they weren’t given anything to do and, again, there were no clips or tangible celebrations of the show.

Normally, you don’t find me wishing for a 90-second clip package as part of an award show, but normally award shows don’t require Woody Harrleson and Matthew McConaughey to kill time.

I liked Reba McEntire’s performance of “Appalachian Memories” in tribute to Dolly Parton. But by ignoring so much of what Parton actually did on television — The Porter Wagoner Show, a wide assortment of TV movies, the aforementioned Buffy — it felt like the TV Academy was paying tribute to Parton out of fear that there would have been criticism if they didn’t, rather than because she warranted that tribute. Which she did.

Macaulay Culkin, Annie Murphy and Dan Levy sweetly honored Catherine O’Hara, while Jamie Lee Curtis gave rushed tributes to both James Burrows and Rob Reiner. But if you told me that the Burrows/Reiner tributes were wholly unplanned and somebody had just pushed Curtis out onto the stage and told her to do the best she could, I’d believe you.

Almost all those moments came in the second half of the show — a half that also featured a more traditional, but well-executed necrology with Noah Kahan doing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and the audience blissfully muted through the entire segment.

The second half of the show and the first half felt completely disconnected, as if to acknowledge that some viewers watch award shows for silly comedy bits and some watch for sincerity, while implying that nobody watches for both. This is not true. The artistry of award show producing is creating an emotional ebb and flow stretching across three+ hours. That’s a standard by which the Emmys were a total failure.

It’s normally the host’s responsibility to establish the flow, to bridge sad and silly and uncomfortable moments with a consistent voice and presence.

Mariska Hargitay was never going to be a traditional award show host. She’s not a comedian, and she isn’t an experienced improviser of the sort that the job normally requires. What she is, fortunately, is a good sport, and she maintained her own energy admirably throughout — which is not the same as maintaining the show’s energy, I’m afraid.

Hargitay had an okay, if completely forgettable, monologue that was admirably brief, and a few pieces of crowd work that succeeded based on how well-liked she is, which comes from nearly 30 years of steady work in broadcast television.

She was also stuck in two dreadful music numbers, either of which could easily have been cut. Except that then the show would have been 2.5 hours and NBC’s affiliates would have revolted.

OK, you couldn’t have cut the “I Love TV Screens” number set to “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” because the sponsors — United Airlines and Marriott in particular — would have freaked out. But does anybody even remember anything about the limp parody of Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger”? It related to TV shows that ended during this Emmy cycle, except it included The Bear, which will still be eligible at next year’s telecast. Look, you can’t use one calendar to justify a premature 30th anniversary for Buffy and a different one for the end of The Bear.

Hargitay was enthusiastic and willing to joke about her limitations and, in truth, I blame almost all her failings on the writing. She was at the mercy of what she was given, as opposed to John Mulaney who came out and did John Mulaney things for five minutes, reminding us what a tight, carefully considered set feels like in this context. I don’t know if Mulaney is hesitant to take on the responsibility of a full hosting stint or if the Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, Globes and Tonys are hesitant about him, but it’s mighty obvious he can do the job.

Outside of what the producers could control, the show was fine. There were a lot of well-deserving winners throughout, including the near-sweep for Widow’s Bay, multiple wins for Matthew Rhys, record-tying triumphs for Jean Smart and Allison Janney, the limited series win for DTF St. Louis, Seehorn’s long-overdue first Emmy and a surprising fifth win for Vince Gilligan.

For better or worse, depending on your ideological perspective, it was a bizarrely politics-free evening, which I guess is what happens when Noah Wyle beats Mark Ruffalo and Kate O’Flynn tops Hannah Einbinder. Sally Field, taking home her fourth Emmy for a Netflix movie with an octopus, was the only person to express veiled caution about the Paramount/Warner Bros. deal and one of a few winners to get applause by mentioning Canada. There were some salutes to human creativity, presumably at the expense of AI, but nobody wanted to say “AI.”

But Tom Pelphrey likably celebrated pregnant partner Kaley Cuoco, Stephen Colbert received a fully expected final send-off win for The Late Show, and Widow’s Bay creator Katie Dippold gave folks on social media several opportunities to share her famous/notorious Babadook tweet.

And with an early-ending show, I filed ahead of my deadline. So there’s that.