I have sat in the room at the Emmys multiple times. It is a long afternoon that becomes a longer evening, and somewhere around hour three you start doing the math on how many Ubers are queued outside and start panicking about your escape route whilst forgetting there is a show on in front of you.
Me at the Emmys
This year's show had more actual star wattage than it has in years, and it was better produced than ones before (taylor Swift?!?), credit where it's due. But it is still a mammoth proposition with little pay off for viewers dressed up as an evening's entertainment, and mammoth is not what people want from their Monday night anymore. A quick episode of The Gentleman or a catch up on Next Gen NYC is more Monday night wind down viewing.
What the ceremony did give us, though, is a genuinely useful snapshot of where American television actually stands right now, and I break it down below. There's a thread running under everything else in this issue too: who actually gets to control their own story. Charles Spencer sat on his for 29 years and picked this week to finally tell it. Joey King tried to control a narrative about her own face. Tom Cruise gave GQ six thousand words and somehow controlled all of them. And Meghan, for one unfortunate afternoon, controlled none of it at all. Read on for how each of them handled it.
In this edition we also cover:
Table of Contents
If you have any celebrity tips or story ideas you’d like me to investigate, please reply to the email. Enjoy!
