The Best And Worst Moments At The 2020 Emmy Awards

The 2020 Emmy Awards were certainly one of the most singular in the ceremony's history. Usually, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences hands out trophies to the best performers and creatives of the previous season's primetime television at a Hollywood theater each September, but ongoing concerns over the spread of the coronavirus pandemic precluded normalcy. Instead, organizers sent broadcasting gear to the homes of more than a hundred nominees, who remotely checked in with host Jimmy Kimmel — and delivered their acceptance speeches — from home. It's the first-ever Zoom-oriented Emmy Awards, one that felt very specific to a very unique period of time.

Outside of the technological miracle it took to even stage and televise the ceremony, there were plenty of in-show moments that rank among the most memorable in Emmy history. Conversely, there were lots of times when the show fell flat. Here are all the very best and very worst bits of the 2020 Emmy Awards.

The 2020 Emmy Awards leaned way into jokes about nominees and other television industry professionals not being in attendance at the Staples Center with host Jimmy Kimmel, but instead were part of the show digitally and virtually. The evening's Emmy winners still got their trophies just after their victories were announced, either via remotely unlocking boxes with the shiny hardware inside, or by tuxedo/HAZMAT suit-clad production staffers, who delivered them in person at just the right moment. 

Pulling off the latter was a logistical challenge, and early in the Emmys broadcast, producers announced how they planned to do it with a tongue-in-cheek, pre-filmed sketch. Extremely eager, overexcited Emmy Awards interns, it would seem, were the ones tasked with jetting around Hollywood in cars provided by a show advertiser to deliver the statues as quickly and efficiently as possible while also sporting germ-eschewing protective gear from head to toe. But first, these trophy couriers needed to be trained in the fine art of Los Angeles-based stunt driving, and comedian Jo Koy portrayed their teacher. It was a cute, Fast and the Furious-inspired bit, but it wasn't one that was memorable or uproariously funny. It also couldn't hold a candle to a real moment that later when viral, in which nominee Ramy Youssef watched the Emmy he just lost get carted away from his house by one of said couriers (screenshot above) who was on standby to deliver it in case he won. Awkward. 

When it came time in the show for the presentation of one of the night's biggest awards, Outstanding Comedy Series, Schitt's Creek fans, and Emmy prognosticators waited breathlessly to see if the sweet Canadian sitcom would complete its sweep of the comedy portion. But rather than host Jimmy Kimmel or a celebrity presenter reading the names of the nominated shows, the broadcast utilized a video package of famous people advocating for each of the eight honored programs.

Some testimonials were lovely — Gabrielle Union is clearly a diehard Insecure super-fan (she's "Team Lawrence" in that show's ongoing romantic saga), and Lin-Manuel Miranda and Sesame Street's the Count jointly stumping for What We Do in the Shadows was delightful. Other celebrities' plugs felt inexplicable and disingenuous. NFL star J.J. Watt claimed to be very into Amazon's period piece The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, straining to prove his fan bonafides by drawing parallels between football and the show's early '60s comedy world setting. The Michael Douglas / Alan Arkin sitcom The Kominsky Method earned an endorsement from beloved actor and world's greatest narrator Morgan Freeman, although one remark may suggest he might never have seen the show, and that his remarks were prepared for him. Freeman claims to have stumbled upon the series while channel surfing... which would be hard to do, seeing as how The Kominsky Method is exclusive to Netflix, a streaming service and not a terrestrial network.

Every awards show makes a big to-do about not running too long, struggling to fit into the time slot afforded by the network and to ensure that they cut away to commercial breaks at just the right times. The Emmy Awards are no exception, generally limiting what are often entertaining, moving, gracious, or hilarious acceptance speeches to less than a minute, with the house orchestra playing louder if the winner talks for too long. The 2020 Emmy Awards featured winners delivering speeches from home, so producers didn't cut anybody off, but the show still zipped along quickly and ran just a few minutes over its three-hour time slot.

They definitely could have cut a couple minutes out of the broadcast to fit, and it's the same thing that all awards shows could cut out of their televised ceremonies: the vague, state-of-the-industry speech from a big-shot at the organization handing out the trophies. People tune in to the Emmy Awards to see celebrities and the shows they hold dear (which in 2020 included profound, important works like Watchmen and Mrs. America). Very few look forward to a rambling, sedate speech from a TV industry executive who isn't exactly a household name. At the 2020 Emmys, Television Academy head Frank Scherma (above) at least ended his speech by introducing Oprah Winfrey and Chris Rock, who then presented the Governors Award to Tyler Perry — but Winfrey and Rock didn't need somebody to throw to them.

ABC aired the 2020 Emmy Awards and gave hosting duties to Jimmy Kimmel, star of the network's late-night Jimmy Kimmel Live. The broadcast carried Kimmel's usual vibe — silly, lightly satirical, and fun — but was also beset with comedy pieces going on for far too long. Perhaps the lack of a live audience affected the energy of the performers. At one point, Little Fires Everywhere stars Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington patched into the show to deliver some trite and tired coronavirus comedy. They claimed to be having themselves an early New Year's Eve party, because 2020 has been so awful they want it to be over, and with quarantine, nobody even knows what day it is anyway.

Just before the awarding of the evening's final trophy, Kimmel made a subtle allusion to the bungling of Best Picture at the 2017 Academy Awards, a ceremony he hosted. Then, curiously, presenter Sterling K. Brown emerged and made virtually the same joke, and then kept making it. Playing off of how the producers of La La Land gave their speeches before learning that Moonlight had actually won, Brown rambled on about how happy he was that his NBC show, This Is Us, had secured Outstanding Dramatic Series, proving that network TV was not, in fact, dead. Then Brown suddenly realized he was holding an envelope, not an actual Emmy, and that he hadn't won because This Is Us hadn't even been nominated.

Through numerous jokes and sketches, 2020 Emmy Awards host Jimmy Kimmel did his best to own the fact that the show was taking place amid a pandemic, with all but a handful of presenters and winners stuck at their homes far away due to stay-at-home orders and coronavirus reduction measures. But in the end, it didn't do much to diminish the sad tone that hung over the whole ceremony.

What's supposed to be a glamorous event where every TV big-wig and glamorous star is one room for one night, all dressed to the nines and celebrating each other, turned out to be a glorified Zoom work meeting. Producers tried their hardest, and a weird Emmys is better than no Emmys at all, but the show was painfully awkward at times. Lots of winners had no choice but to deliver the most important speeches of their lives from their living room via weak internet connection or be beamed across the ether with non-syncing video and audio.

Most notably, perhaps, was Mark Ruffalo delivering an impassioned speech about empathy and kindness when he won for his work on I Know This Much is True, but something was lost in transmission without the energy and support of an audience of his peers cheering and applauding. The silence loudly hinted at viewers just what the pandemic had taken away from the 2020 Emmy Awards.