"This may be the saddest Emmys of all time, but we could not be happier," he said.The CBS telecast, hosted with gusto by Neil Patrick Harris, was smothered by five "in memoriam" tributes to individuals as well as a montage late in the telecast. I gotta go, bye.” A close second in the awesome-acceptance-speech department came from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who collected her comedic-actress Emmy with Veep co-star (and supporting comedic-actor winner) Tony Hale in tow. The joke just got staler when an unamused Kevin Spacey, the star of Netflix’s hit “House of Cards,” turned and addressed the camera as House Majority Whip Francis Underwood, his fictional character from the show. Later, Harris’s “How I Met Your Mother” co-stars confronted him in an intervention for “EHD” (excessive hosting disorder), treatable only at the “Ryan Seacrest Center for Excessive Hosting.” 
 
 Halfway through the evening, Harris finally brought out the jaunty song-and-dance routines, the main symptom of his EHD, with a number called “The Number in the Middle of the Show.” (Sample lyric: “The Emmy Awards are three hours long / Now there’s three minutes less to go.”) One can’t imagine a flashier way to demonstrate that Hollywood’s awards-show writers desperately need to think of a way to tell jokes that aren’t about telling jokes; to stage a show that’s not only about the show. The best line of the evening came very early on from Merritt Wever, who seemed so shocked at winning the supporting actress Emmy for a comedy show (“Nurse Jackie”) that she went with her flusteredness and said: “I gotta go, bye.” 
 
 The rest of us (well, some of us) gotta stay, alas, in a listless position on the couch while the Emmys poked along as flatly as possible. Michael Douglas also scored some laughs with his innuendo-laden acceptance speech for Behind the Candelabra, acknowledging that the movie was a “two-hander” and giving his co-star Matt Damon the choice of “the bottom or the top” for his half of the award. Over on cable, however, @BreakingBad_AMC was amazing.”) How could it be, with the steady stream of in-memoriam segments that stopped just long enough for a series of less relevant downers including, but not limited to, a Beatles cover performed by Carrie Underwood, a U.S.-history lesson from Don Cheadle, and a tribute to Liberace by Elton John? Joining Wever with their own surprise wins were Jeff Daniels in the dramatic-actor category (where he was up against such heavy-hitting nominees as Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, and Homeland’s Damian Lewis) and Boardwalk Empire’s Bobby Cannavale in the dramatic-supporting-actor race (which featured Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, Homeland’s Mandy Patinkin, and Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage). “The Emmys are so good this year,” Stephen Colbert deadpanned as he and his “Colbert Report” crew accepted the award for variety series writing.
– The reviews are in for last night's Emmy Awards, and they are not good. (Catch up on what happened here.) One big problem: The In Memoriam segments that seemed to arrive every 20 minutes or so. A sampling of the reactions: The "steady stream of in-memoriam segments ... stopped just long enough for a series of less relevant downers including, but not limited to, a Beatles cover performed by Carrie Underwood, a US-history lesson from Don Cheadle, and a tribute to Liberace by Elton John," writes Julie Miller in Vanity Fair, calling the proceedings "torturous" and "relentlessly depressing." The CBS telecast "was, in a word, a bummer," writes Curt Wagner in the Chicago Tribune. Host Neil Patrick Harris "tried to bring up the energy ... but nothing seemed to help. Every time the show got moving, a tribute cast a pall over the proceedings." The opening sketch was "dreary," the first onstage piece "tiresome," and the whole thing "anemic and often awkward," writes Hank Stuever in the Washington Post. All the jokes seemed to be about the show itself, and then there were the bits that were included because ... why? No one seems to know (think the aforementioned Carrie Underwood performance). "So, to sum up: An awards show filled with skits about how bad awards shows are gave awards to people who talked about how bad the show turned out, while everyone on Twitter had decided that hours earlier." There were lots of unexpected wins, but even so, the whole thing was "a bloated bore," writes David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter. The "overload of solemnity" and "self-important sobriety" was part of the problem, but the "labored filler segments" were also pretty bad—especially considering they were the reason the "award recipients were played off virtually as soon as they began speaking." Even a long-overdue best drama win for Breaking Bad couldn't save this "plodding, lifeless, and just plain glum" show. Everyone agrees, however, Merritt Wever's acceptance speech was a total highlight.