effectively began with a speech by a star from the recent past: Bryan Cranston, who recalled watching the moon landing on television, noting that the most famous televised event in history made him feel he could “go anywhere — even Albuquerque.”
The reference to the setting of “Breaking Bad,” the past Emmy champ that wrapped in 2013, felt practically as distant as the one to Neil Armstrong. That show, which built in momentum through its five-season run to become a major zeitgeist and popular hit, would have felt odd and out-of-place at this year’s show. And the 2019painted a picture of a medium in chaos, a maelstrom that the telecast struggled to depict but that core fans of TV could only have cheered.
Elsewhere, Patricia Arquette’s mammoth, double-nomination year was acknowledged with an unexpected win for her supporting role in Hulu’s “The Act,” leaving the path clear for Michelle Williams’s intricate and painful work in FX’s “Fosse/Verdon” in lead. Ben Whishaw of Amazon’s “A Very English Scandal” and Jharrel Jerome of Netflix’s “When They See Us” won supporting and lead acting Emmys over better-known contenders, cementing the impact of limited series on streaming.
The night — but for a lull when HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” took home their honors — seemed to roil with dangerous possibility in precisely the way TV itself has been doing for years now. Shows as fundamentally themselves as “” and “Pose” have been getting made for years. But now they actually stand a chance of recognition on a grand scale, one that still matters and will only matter more the more it actually finds what is great and not merely what is familiar.
“Succession” and “Ozark” may return next year — or they may not! Suddenly, a ceremony governed by rules as seemingly as unchangeable as the tides seems cracked open. Surprise wins are nothing new for the Emmys, but the pile-up of wins all moving in a direction towards the smaller and the stranger felt, for lack of a better word, .