The TV Watch: Old Guard Keeps Grip on Celebration

Old Guard Keeps Grip on Celebration

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Michael Douglas, best actor winner for the HBO movie “Behind the Candelabra.”

Despite all the fear and anxiety, Netflix didn’t steal the night in the end. “Modern Family” on ABC won the Emmy Award for best comedy, which was almost a surprise because it has won so many times before and because other shows, like “Veep” of HBO, have gained ground. “Breaking Bad,” on the other hand, is about to end its run, so it was almost inevitable that that AMC hit would get yet another standing ovation.

Many other wins were unexpected, and some were well-deservedâ€" like Jeff Daniels, who won the best drama actor award for “The Newsroom” on HBO, and Merritt Wever, of “Nurse Jackie” on Showtime, who won the award for best supporting actress in a comedy. Ms. Wever proved she deserved her statuette, giving the shortest and best acceptance speech. She thanked the academy, then said, “I gotta go, bye,” and walked offstage.

If it’s a new and golden age of television, as so many presenters insisted, you couldn’t tell from the host, Neil Patrick Harris, who treated the Emmys like the Tonys and made self-conscious jokes about the precariousness and even irrelevance of classic television in the era of on-demand premium cable and Internet streaming. Mr. Harris said that the awards show would celebrate the best of television, then added, “For our younger audience, that’s the thing you watch on your phones.”

In a night was could have celebrated the many exciting innovations in the field, the Emmy producers chose to look backward, not only with tributes to dead actors but also with mournful references to a more glorious time in broadcast television, particularly on CBS, which presented the event. The network put its chief executive, Leslie Moonves, in a coy cameo in the opening skit, and it stretched a link between the anniversary of CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination and the Beatles’ first performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on CBS, so that Carrie Underwood could sing “Yesterday.”

CBS executives seem so worried about their own mortality that they’re celebrating their own mortality.

Insecurity may also be the reason the show kept veering off into song-and-dance routines that have no bearing on the Emmys. Mr. Harris, a perennial awards show host, was mocked in a fake ad in which his “How I Met Your Mother” co-stars warned about the risks of Excessive Hosting Disorder. But it was the show itself that needed an intervention, shifting from Emmy awards to musical numbers better suited to the Tonys and the Grammys: Awards Show Identity Disorder. Mr. Harris did two song-and-dance numbers, including one that paid tribute to “Mad Men” with a tune from “Guys and Dolls.” The other made fun of its own irrelevance to the moment at hand: “It’s the number in the middle of the show.”

That was a lot of time wasted on a night when there were so many deaths to acknowledge, including those of Cory Monteith of “Glee” and James Gandolfini, once of “The Sopranos.”

Even stars who didn’t die this past year got a shout-out. Michael Douglas’s best actor award for a mini-series was one of three that “Behind the Candelabra,” an HBO biopic of Liberace, won. (Mr. Douglas thanked his co-star, Matt Damon, who played his younger lover, and said he would split the statuette with him, saying roguishly, “Do you want the bottom or the top?”)

With that many awards, it wasn’t clear why Elton John needed to sing a solemn song from his new album that had nothing to do with that legendary Vegas showman, But it certainly wasn’t much of an homage to play on an unadorned piano and no candelabra in the wind.

Fashion, always a side benefit of an awards show, wasn’t much more innovative or exciting. There is so much change in the industry and so little experimentation in wardrobe choices: year after year, actresses, or rather their stylists, select tasteful, risk-free monochromatic, strapless gowns by Valentino or Prada or Zac Posen. Hollywood is still so haunted by the over-the-top fashion faux-pas of Cher or Björk that even comedy stars abide by the sartorial equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: first do no fashion harm. And that made Lena Dunham’s choice of a bold, full-skirted green ball gown covered with giant red roses, seem even more shocking than her near-nudity famous on “Girls.”

The real winner of the night may have cynicism and public distrust of government.

Seven or eight days away from a possible government shutdown, some of the winners, like “Veep,” “Homeland” and even “Political Animals,” reflect television’s repulsed but riveted relationship with Washington. The federal government may be a swamp, but it’s a swamp viewers love to splash in. Compared with the waste and gridlock on Sunday’s Emmy awards show, Washington may be a lot more functional.

A version of this article appears in print on September 23, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Old Guard Keeps Grip on Celebration.