The 70th annual Emmy awards started out, unconventionally, with a sketch about diversity. It’s not the bit, exactly, that was surprising; the Emmys are prone to such theatrics. And certainly, the diversity of Hollywood—or the lack thereof—has prompted many awards hosts in recent years, including Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel, to take well-timed digs at the overwhelming whiteness of both the TV Academy and the Film Academy.
But Emmys co-hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost—who weren’t even onstage for that opening skit—didn’t bring the same perspective to their show’s jokes about diversity. The opening number was called “We Solved It”—“we” meaning Hollywood, “it” meaning diversity—and performed by NBC stars like Leslie Jones, John Legend, Kristen Bell, Kenan Thompson, and Kate McKinnon, none of whom showed more than tepid enthusiasm.
The song attempted to make fun of how self-congratulatory Hollywood can be about its own meager advances in diversity, and in a line here and there, it managed to drive its point home. But mostly, the lackluster performance was neither funny nor sharp; its casual approach to sensitive material seemed to erase the sense of urgency that most proponents of diversity feel. In fact, most of the show’s jokes about diversity—which recurred throughout the evening—seemed amused at the very idea that this issue is an earnest concern, one that really matters to a lot of people. By its conclusion, the opening number was throwing to “The One-of-Each Dancers,” a multi-ethnic ensemble of performers dressed in the colors of the rainbow. That could have been a sweet gesture, were it not for the snide umbrella term they were given.
I’ll leave my colleague Richard Lawson to give you the skinny on Jost’s and Che’s efforts to make the show tick. What I found striking, though, is that as obsessed as the Emmys were with the idea of diversity, the actual winners were largely white. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Amazon’s frothy period drama starring Rachel Brosnahan, won the most awards given this evening—including a lead-actress statue for Brosnahan herself. Following close behind it were Netflix’s Godless and The Crown, FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, HBO’s Barry, and perennial juggernaut Game of Thrones. The spectacular Atlanta was snubbed in all major categories, despite its multiple wins at the Golden Globes; Black-ish, a perennial nominee, was passed over for newcomers Maisel and Barry. Insecure’s Issa Rae, a breakout star, had to be content with her one nomination. And Regina King, who won for her turn in Netflix’s Seven Seconds, had something of a Pyrrhic victory; she nabbed an award for a series that the streaming platform canceled out from under her.
It’s remarkable that in an Emmys where talking about inclusion was of paramount importance, the shows that broke through were the ones that barely addressed race at all. Godless, on Netflix, was a classic Western that stunned with its cinematography but was hamstrung, narratively, by the retrograde racial dynamics of the genre. (A town of black people, in the show, is called “Blacktown.”) Maisel was the brainchild of veteran TV producer Amy Sherman-Palladino, who won back-to-back awards for outstanding comedy writing and directing—but Sherman-Palladino’s previous shows, Gilmore Girls and Bunheads, famously never approached the fraught territory of race, and Maisel, too, features a largely white-passing cast. Barry focuses more on the struggle of its protagonist’s soul than any wider social commentary about race, and The Crown is, definitively, a history of white privilege.
I admire all the shows discussed above (and outright love The Crown, Maisel, and Barry)—but as the Emmys wore on, it was hard not to see a discrepancy between the dialogue happening onstage and the outcome of the voting itself, all of which was conducted privately several weeks ago. Outside of a few rogue winners, such as Thandie Newton’s incredibly well-deserved victory for Westworld, the winners largely fell within the bounds of what we have come to demographically expect from this industry, and these awards.
The contrast was heightened, at one point, by a sighting of “Teddy Perkins” sitting in the Emmys audience—the ghoulish character from Atlanta’s episode of the same name, who covers up his dark skin and racial features with thick white makeup and a wig. In the episode, show star, creator, and sometime director Donald Glover plays the heavily made-up Perkins. It was unclear, as of Monday night, if the Teddy Perkins we saw sitting in the audience was actually Glover in costume, or if he was co-star Lakeith Stanfield, or a third actor entirely. If Atlanta had won, perhaps Teddy Perkins would have come onstage and had some thoughts to offer the audience. It feels illustrative of the evening that Monday night’s awards show skipped over the opportunity to even have that conversation.
Mid-run, the telecast aired a pre-taped segment in which Che ran around to overlooked black TV actors and handed them “reparations Emmys,” a bit that felt both awkward and welcome—an uncomfortable and unauthorized way for the Emmys to try to make up for decades of exclusion. The awards clearly made an effort to bring diverse talent onstage to present the awards, and the winners at the pre-broadcast Creative Arts Emmys included an unprecedented number of actors of color winning for guest and supporting roles. But when it came to the major prizes, the Academy seemed to show a preference for shows that elide the problem of race or eschew discussing it entirely.
Perhaps that opening number was successful after all, in encapsulating the trouble with paying lip service to an endemic problem. It’s certainly more fun to joke about diversity and inclusion than it is to actually attempt to tackle the underlying, unconscious prejudices that inform voters’ decisions, no matter how well-intentioned or earnest they may be. To solve this issue, we’ll certainly need more than a song and dance.
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