The Emmys Totally Sucked

The jokes were dull, the winners predictable, the speeches navel-gazing, and Jon Cryer actually won a lead actor award for Two and a Half Men—needless to say, the reviews of last night's Emmy Awards are not glowing:

• In the Washington Post, Dan Zak begs the nation to "give up on the Emmys." The "painfully scripted night" was filled with "wan bits" from host Jimmy Kimmel, and by the third hour, "viewers had presumably expired from sheer boredom." Next year, please, Zak begs—don't tune in.
• Perhaps the best part of the show came during the opener, with Girls' Lena Dunham "sitting on a toilet, naked, eating a piece of cake, … proving yet again that she really doesn’t give a shit about what people think of her or her body," writes Willa Paskin on Salon. It was downhill from there. Kimmel's monologue was a snooze, his bits in between winners were "hugely self-aggrandizing," and his "product placement" prank involving Tracy Morgan was just plain "gross." Not to mention the show was at least an hour longer than necessary.

• Cryer himself noted that something had "clearly gone wrong" when he won over Larry David, Louis CK, Don Cheadle, Alec Baldwin, and Jim Parsons—but the truth is that "the entire Emmys telecast" went wrong, writes Tim Molloy on The Wrap. "It was hideous," which is a shame because "television had a very good year, and this was not the show it deserved."
• To be fair, not everyone hated the broadcast. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rob Owen heaps it with love, calling the sketches "hilarious" and the nominee introductions "clever." Kimmel moved things along briskly with "mostly funny and energizing" bits, he writes. "This is how the Emmy Awards should be staged."

Click for the night's big winners. (More Emmy Awards stories.)