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Host with the most

On an Emmy night of few surprises, Conan O'Brien was a breath of fresh satire. Somebody give that man the Oscars job!

By ERIC DEGGANS
Published August 29, 2006

These are five words I never expected to write in my entire TV critic career:

Thank God for Conan O'Brien.

That's because, on an Emmy night when nearly every winner was a safe, expected choice - Monk's Tony Shalhoub, West Wing's Alan Alda, Will & Grace's Megan Mullally, The Office, The Daily Show and 24, to name a few - O'Brien turned a ho-hum mix of oddball honorees and perennial favorites into sharp satire Sunday.

Best of all, because the gangly redhead delivered his lines with such goofy exuberance, few people reacted to the sharp elbows he threw at Hollywood's dream factory. Indeed, if you read between the lines, much of O'Brien's performance was devoted to highlighting how absurd this year's Emmy Awards were, though the targets of his barbs seemed too busy laughing to get the deeper jokes.

The first knock came during the opening skit, when O'Brien inserted himself into a host of hit series in a baldfaced adaptation of Billy Crystal's traditional Oscar openings. Was it a coincidence that he landed mostly in shows that Emmy voters didn't have the good sense to honor?

One moment, he was poking fun at them for snubbing Lost, then he was sliding into South Park's twisted animated universe, where a guy who looked suspiciously like Tom Cruise wouldn't come out of a bedroom closet.

Mel Gibson got dinged as Al-Jazeera's new poster boy, just before O'Brien noted the irony of party hound Charlie Sheen's success playing a guy who helps parent his brother's child the show biz subtext: Sheen's messy divorce proceedings also have brought accusations that he threatened and cursed at his real kids; there's a reason the camera showed only the cast of Sheen's Two and Half Men before O'Brien's punch line.

There was a musical number set to the classic Music Man routine Ya Got Trouble, referencing NBC's awful ratings with the pithy lines: "The guy who passed on Lost/Was promoted instead of tossed/And now the peacock's getting it at both ends."

He even stuck beloved comedy icon Bob Newhart in a plastic tube, saying Newhart had three hours of air and setting up the funniest running joke about long-winded acceptance speeches I've seen in a long time.

Who knew the guy behind silly Late Night bits like "If They Mated" and "New U.S. Stamps" had this much nerve?

Turns out, Sunday's show needed everything O'Brien could muster. Sure, there were some unexpected turns: Andre Braugher seemed as surprised as everyone else when he was named best actor in a miniseries for FX's canceled heist series Thief.

But other surprises were mostly negative. Robbing The West Wing's Martin Sheen for Kiefer Sutherland's hyperventilating action dude on 24? Snubbing The Office's Steve Carell to bestow yet another misplaced comedy trophy on Shalhoub? Disregarding My Name Is Earl's Jaime Pressley to hand another supporting actress trophy to an increasingly grating Mullally (an aside: Does it really make sense to hand the woman with the most annoying voice on television a syndicated talk show)?

Overall, four major awards went to performers from series that have been canceled, making Sunday night feel more like a trip through network TV's past even before the borderline morbid tributes to Dick Clark, who's recovering from a stroke, and deceased Charlie's Angels creator Aaron Spelling.

Stephen Colbert's sort of mock emotional outburst after he, David Letterman and Craig Ferguson lost the individual variety performance award to Barry Manilow - "I lost to the Copacabana! Singing and dancing is not performing!" - said it all. Small wonder viewership Sunday was the fourth-lowest in Emmy history, at 16.1-million viewers, a 14 percent decline from last year, according to the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, those of us who sat through it all can console ourselves with the knowledge that at least one star was grown Sunday night (even if NBC did wind up apologizing Monday for "unintentional pain" caused by the opening skit, which featured a plane crash on the same day a real accident killed 49 people in Kentucky).

And when O'Brien takes his rightful place hosting the Oscars next, we can say we knew him when.

Eric Deggans can be reached at deggans@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8521. See his blog at www.sptimes.com/blogs/media.

[Last modified August 29, 2006, 05:38:40]