Well, that was disappointing. I bother to actually watch the Emmys and nobody I was rooting for won anything. Although I was unaware that Dame Maggie Smith was up for something -- good for her! I don't watch Downton Abbey, but she's a pretty awesome person. You don't get to be a Lady of a Certain Age and still be on television without being a damn sight sharper than people give you credit for, and people give her credit for a lot.

I am generally puzzled at the lack of fuss made over the Sherlock people, to be honest. I didn't even expect the fuss to be for Sherlock -- both of the leads are currently working on a massive, long-awaited, endlessly hyped fantasy movie adaptation of a classic piece of literature, which follows a trilogy of like from the same director, and will probably gross about as much as Avengers. The bobblehead doing interviews on the red carpet asked Stephen Colbert what he thought about The Hobbit, and inexplicably didn't go scare up the actual hobbit for questions, even though he was milling about somewhere quite nearby.

Seriously, right fucking there. I know he's short, but as far as I can tell he spent the night attached to the tall one with the cheekbones, who is pretty obvious anywhere.

[Edit to add: The source for the picture above is evidently the Fug Girls, who posted it to Twitter. I knew I loved them for a reason. I would have followed their liveblog, but they were busy actually being there this year, and were too occupied to type.]

[[Edit to add to the edit to add: Evidently the head of curly hair in the front IS one of the Fug Girls. Heather, specifically. If they were the only people to have hunted down and talked to the Sherlock leads that entire evening, they are going to be so swamped for the next few days.]]

(tumblr says Mark Gatiss attended as well, although I haven't the foggiest whether he was there alone or with his husband in tow. Neither he nor either of the leads are in any of the red carpet photostreams, which I also find baffling. HOBBIT, GUYS. What gives?)

The audience was curiously out of sync with whoever it was voting for these things. My stream wasn't running for the comedy or reality stuff, but for the rest of it I had to wonder who the hell was running this show. The winner were never the pieces that got the big bursts of applause, so far as I could tell. The winners were all rather suspiciously patriotic -- a movie about a politician, a series about soldiers, and a miniseries about the Hatfields & McCoys. (Not that they weren't good; they probably were. I just haven't seen them and can't comment personally.) The audience favorites, on the other hand, were near-uniformly British or joint productions: Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, and Sherlock.

Surprisingly little fuss was made about the leads for those series, too. Dame Maggie wasn't even in attendance to collect her Emmy herself. My country makes me want to bang my head on the wall, sometimes.

On the other hand, the variety show category -- which is almost exclusively for news-comedy shows these days -- involved a hilarious bit that was apparently worked out ahead of time, where all the nominees dogpiled the winner (Jon Stewart) in the aisle when his name was called, trying to prevent him from achieving the stage. The American news-comedy commentary shows, for those who don't live here, are all actually pretty close-knit; some of the people who have their own show now started as supporting "correspondents" on earlier ones, and almost all of the hosts began their careers as "anchors" on "Weekend News Update" on Saturday Night Live. They're all screamingly liberal in real life, and also all friends. It's awesome.

I also somehow missed that Michael J. Fox was up for Best Guest Actor on a Comedy -- didn't even know he was attending until they caught him on the red carpet, and they gave him one of the later segments to host. He's doing what I would term 'pretty fucking well', honestly. Parkinson's has not yet made him unreadable, although his cues are certainly different than when he was younger; I find it oddly charming that I can't always tell the difference between his "I'm on stage again, yahoo" and "I've doubled up on my levodopa, just in case" -- he's always been a little bit ticcy and animated. Also, his wife towers over him in her dress heels, and he doesn't care at all.

Off to go watch tumblr implode. Evidently "A Scandal In Belgravia" is trending somewhere (Twitter? G+? I can't tell from the graphic) and I expect there to be a great deal of interwebs angst.

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