May 23, 2000
Looking back at the Daytime Emmy’s - THE COMMENTARY
By Joseph Planta
VANCOUVER -- Last Friday’s 27th Daytime Annual Emmy Awards are ripe for my comment. Regis Philbin has been nominated for something like 10 Emmy’s for his gabfest, Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, and also got another nod this year for his hosting chores on the mega-hit, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Well, as the snub heard ‘round America this morning, the Reege went Emmyless.
First, the Talk Show host Emmy went to Rosie O’Donnell for the fourth time. O’Donnell, may have deserved it for her work into changing her show - a Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin chat show, into the more cerebral or heart-string tugger, Oprah type show. This year (like last year), I thought the team of ladies on The View deserved the Emmy, but alas Rosie won. (If Oprah was still in the running, I’m sure she’d have won something. Oprah took her name and her show out of the competition last year.)
Even going into the race, Regis Philbin has always been the bridesmaid that never took home the Emmy. When he and Susan Lucci hosted the Emmy’s a couple year’s back, he bitched publicly about the fact he went Emmyless. It seemed as though his nod for Millionaire would break that jinx. Alas, it was a huge surprise that in the category for Best Game Show host there was a tie. The bigger surprise was on Jackie Zeman’s face when she revealed that the two winners did not include the Reege. The winners? Bob Barker for the venerable The Price is Right and... big surprise, Tom Bergeron for Hollywood Squares.
(In all actuality, if you watch an episode of Hollywood Squares and compare it to Regis or Alex Trebek, Tom Bergeron is actually very deserving of the award. He can read the cards, or the TelePrompTer, and he can put up with Whoppi Goldberg and the other 8 stars, and be funny at the same time.)
Before I dissect that categories winners, let’s dissect the nominees. So in that category there were Regis, Barker and Bergeron. The other two nominees included Alex Trebek and Pat Sajack, of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, respectively. All deserving, but another nominee missing was the tandem of Jimmy Kimmel and Ben Stein of Win Ben Stein’s Money, which won the Best Game Show and Best Game Show Host Emmy’s last year. That show’s inventive and actually a good game show. Both Kimmel and Stein are good too.
One scenario that could have popped up, and that crossed my mind when the tie was announced, was the fact that Alex Trebek could win and tie with Regis. Everyone on the planet thought Regis would win, and when the tie was announced, what if he won with Alex Trebek? Trebek was quite critical of Millionaire’s success, criticising the ease of which the show’s questions unfolded. Their feud continues.
General Hospital won the best Drama Series trophy, something I did predict in this column on Friday.
Regarding the Barbara Walters Lifetime Achievement Award: I am rather critical of that choice. Now, no slight on Barbara, who’s a superb television personality and a terrific journalist, but this is the daytime Emmy’s and that award is usually reserved for people like, Oprah Winfrey, Fred Rogers, Bob Barker (who received it last year), Ted and Betty Corday (the creators of Days of Our Lives), and Phil Donahue. People who have been fixtures on daytime television. Sure, Miss Walters hosted The Today Show for a couple decades and The View is an okay show, but in all actuality, the most memorable things of Barbara come form her work in Primetime. Being the first anchor woman of an American supperhour newscast (In the late ‘70s she anchored the ABC Evening News with the late Harry Reasoner) or her work on 20/20 and her famous Primetime specials.
Her selection for the Lifetime Achievement award is slightly suspect and the Academy would have better awarded daytime pioneers like Claire Labine (General Hospital’s and Daytime TV’s legendary scribe), Agnes Nixon (a protégé of the legendary Irma Philips), or Bill Bell (the co-creator of The Young and The Restless and Days of Our Lives.) Barbara Walters is already an inductee in the Television Academy Hall of Fame, so this award was more publicity-grabbing on the part of the telecast’s producer Dick Clark.
Also, for good measure, let me throw in this observation of daytime TV. Sure, it’s the den of cheesy soaps, tawdry sex and gratuitous insinuations of love and lust. It’s also the den of folks like Jerry Springer, Judge Judy and Divorce Court, which caters to our voyeuristic desires of lives crappyer (sic) than our own.
But, daytime television has the great ability to affect ordinary people. Children are watching television during this time period. They watch shows like Sesame Street and Fred Rogers’ Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood. They learn, they are affected. With people like Oprah, The View and now Rosie O’Donnell, they are not only entertained, but they are educated and affected by human stories. Human stories that would only be dramatised on prime-time television for ratings. Daytime television, through those salacious soaps can also dramatise real and horrific situations to raise awareness.
Daytime television has an immense responsibility, and even though the ratings and revenue aren’t nearly as high as in prime-time, television becomes more of a part of the skin of the populous. The industry becomes the catalyst for thought and the institution for change. It can only be our hope, that they live up to that.
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