Kimmel, at his post-Oscars show, proving he can pull off wearing a tux.
One of my favorite part of upfronts week in recent years has been Jimmy Kimmel‘s monologue at the annual ABC fall-season presentation, in which he roasts celebrities (on Charlie Sheen’s comeback: “Tiger Woods must feel like a real dumbass right now”), other networks (on The X Factor: “It’s like American Idol meets a mirror”), and his own (on Wipeout: “Originally, we only had fat people falling down in the summer. But then our creative team got together and said, ‘Follow me here: What if we had fat people falling down in the winter too?'”)
Other late-night hosts make fun of TV, of course, but Kimmel has always given the impression of being someone who really lives and breathes TV–even, or especially, the junk. So while it may be self-dealing for ABC to have Kimmel host the Emmy Awards Sept. 23 (what else is new–Jane Lynch, most recently, hosted for Fox), I still suspect it’s a good move.
Despite my praise for Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes–the mean, funny Gervais, from 2011 anyway–I don’t necessarily believe that every televised awards show needs to be an in-person roast of the medium and stars that it’s celebrating. I mean, I like that sort of thing, but that’s what my Twitter feed is for–that doesn’t mean it fits every venue.
But I’d like to think, and maybe this is just my bias as a critic, that one thing worth loving about TV is that it isn’t quite as full of itself as the official movie industry. (As an industry, that is; I’m sure there are plenty of people full of themselves in both businesses, and certainly in my own.) The Emmys doesn’t necessarily demand, or need, the same kind of reverence that feels obligatory at the Oscars (which has become a three-hour effort to remind you why you used to love going to the movies so much).
TV is a great medium, and it’s a self-deflating medium, and that’s part of its greatness. So I hope when Jimmy Kimmel hosts the Emmys in September, the audience sees him give TV the kind of Kimmel treatment I’ve been used to at the upfronts. Surely a network willing to call a show Good Christian Bitches can take a little name-calling itself?