The 12 Essential Moments From the 2024 Emmy Awards
Ayo’s dad. Candice’s meow. Kathy Bates in the smog. Baranski! Farrell! Johnnie Walker! There’s so much to get into.
The biggest moment of the night at the 2024 Emmy Awards — the second Emmys of the calendar year due to the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes — didn’t happen at the ceremony itself, but rather in the lead-up. It was a sweet and emotional exchange between E! Live from the Red Carpet host Laverne Cox, the first trans person to ever earn an acting nomination at the award show and Nava Mau, the first trans woman to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series. It proved to be the most affecting moment of the night, for me anyway, in recognizing the progress that often gets hollowly touted. “I’m supposed to keep it together, I’m the host,” Cox says. “Me too,” Mau responds, mirroring Cox’s emotion. Cox’s voice breaks as she tells Mau:
“I’m so proud of you.”
Cox collects herself, then says it again.
Here were two trans women basking in each other’s glow, recognized and respected in a room full of their peers for their piece of the pie. It simply can’t be overstated how important this moment was, and especially because of how understated the moment itself was.
The ceremony itself asserted its worth in the ever-expanding world of award shows by showing a willingness to try new things. You had the hosts, for instance, Eugene and Dan Levy, who anchored the night to the tune of 6.87 million viewers — a 60% rise in total viewers from the record-low 4.3 million who tuned in earlier this year. It remains a far cry from decades earlier when the show could command 20 million-plus viewers, but such numbers are no longer achieved thanks to… well, a number of factors that would send us down a rabbit hole we simply don’t have time for when we have things like Christine Baranski in gold metal organza Oscar de La Renta and Colin Farrell looking like breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Did the tableaus of TV dads, TV moms and TV [checks notes] lawyers feel a bit overly-produced? Sure, but paled in comparison to the cringe elicited when Ebon Moss-Bachrach (a winner for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series) and Taylor Zakhar Perez (a winner for eye candy alone) gave us a Johnnie Walker Blue Label ad integrated into their presentation of Outstanding Writing for a Limited or Anthology Series. “It’s okay to have a drink and present — responsibly,” Perez tells Moss-Bachrach after earnestly asking the “bartender” what goes best with a burger. “Promotions masquerading as legitimate material is a scourge to any medium,” wrote the New York Times’s Margaret Lyons, who called the moment “disgraceful.”
Perhaps the most pervasive question of the evening — aside from “Is The Bear a comedy?”, which we’ll get to — was the validity of repeat winners. Julia Louis-Dreyfus had six consecutive wins for playing Selina Meyer on Veep from 2012 to 2017. After winning her fifth award for Murphy Brown, Candice Bergen famously declined future nominations for the role. RuPaul had won the award Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality Competition Program for eight years in a row before being dismantled this year by Alan Cumming. These examples to highlight the Emmy Awards’s proclivity toward sameness. During his speech, Cumming highlighted this very point:
“We are a new show and when you guys like something, you tend to stick to it, which is a good quality, but we appreciate it all the more.”
And while we got repeat winners in Jeremy Allen White, Jean Smart and Moss-Bachrach, we got some new blood thanks to Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai, Liza Colón-Zayas, Richard Gadd, Jessica Gunning and Lamorne Morris, plus a surprise triumph for Hacks over The Bear in Outstanding Comedy Series.
Now, with all that table-setting, let’s get to the moments of the night.