Early into last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, which was held at the Forum following a massive renovation project for the Inglewood venue, No Doubt front woman Gwen Stefani presented the ceremony’s first award, “Best Female Video” with rapper Snoop Dogg. Of her he said “‘you’re not just a girl,’ you’re L.A.’s finest girl.” Of him she said, “‘Inglewood up to no good.’ I remember the first time [Dr.] Dre unleashed you onto the world and I heard that song.” Stefani actually quoted a Tupac line (sloppy writing), yet the pairing nodded to a 90s revival that the channel helped facilitate. Over the summer, Nicki Minaj sampled Sir Mix-A-Lot, Meghan Trainor channeled Sublime’s Bradley Nowell, Ariana Grande conjured Mariah Carey, Lorde revised girl power, Five Seconds of Summer closed the gap between boy bands and emo, and the cable channel rebooted House of Style with Iggy Azalea, who dressed as Cher Horowitz for her mainstream debut.

MTV dropped “music television” from its logo back in 2010, but hagiography continues to be a big part of the brand. The ceremony’s red carpet coverage prioritized Amber Rose’s sartorial tribute to the “naked” dress Rose McGowan wore to the 1998 ceremony and reclaimed Katy Perry and Riff Raff’s Britney-and-Justin denim ensemble from the 2001 AMAs as a VMA moment. Female empowerment emerged as a dominant narrative for last night’s ceremony. The show set this agenda early in the broadcast by giving out “Best Female Video” first, a point co-presenter Stefani emphasized by stating “this year, the ladies are taking over.” But astute viewers remember that Madonna gave herself away at the ceremony’s first performance in 1984, in the process setting a standard for broadcast-friendly performances of women’s sexualized self-exploitation for generations.

However, it makes sense that Stefani presented the night’s first award to Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse,” which relied upon a trap beat, a culturally insensitive video, and Juicy J for mainstream success. The Material Girl created a template for the music industry’s blonde ambition, particularly its twin impulses to objectify and appropriate for professional gain. But Madonna studied genre at a time when coherent album-length statements still mattered. She was a confessional balladeer one minute, Breathless Mahoney the next. Stefani layered generic signifiers during the time of singles’ resurgence, approaching genre through the lens of hybridity. In 2002, Gayle Wald summarized the consequence of Stefani’s influence thusly: “In focusing attention on gender performance as a privileged site and source of political oppositionality . . . critical questions of national, cultural, and racial appropriation can be made to disappear under the sign of transgressive gender performance” (194-195). As a result, Stefani’s reckless play with signifiers as a result of her white female privilege helped advance the “post” approach to feminism, race, genre, and identity that many contemporary female pop stars continue to follow. Why not reverse engineer a KROQ playlist from rap, reggae, trip-hop, new wave, and industrial’s disparate formal elements for “Hella Good” and “Hollaback Girl”? Why not set off baggy jeans and a retro up-do with a bindhi while you’re at it?

Yet the VMAs seemed to demur from racial controversy. Perhaps MTV is still reeling from Miley Cyrus’ apocalyptic minstrelsy. Perhaps it’s because, as Common’s moment of silence for Mike Brown suggested, the stakes are too high. But it was a messy year for the VMAs. The night’s dominant narrative might have been “girls rule,” as women took home ten of the ceremony’s 16 awards. But the victories weren’t won without a few split seams which drew attention to how the rhetoric of female empowerment relies upon the unstable relationship between unruliness and restraint. Nicki Minaj had a wardrobe malfunction during the ceremony’s opening medley because she wasn’t given enough time to change. Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande struggled with their songs’ vocal demands. Lorde didn’t know what camera to address during her acceptance speech for Best Rock Video. Cyrus ceded her acceptance speech for Video of the Year to a young man who spoke as an advocate for homeless youth. Beyoncé concluded the night with a brief acceptance speech for the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award as an afterthought to her sixteen-minute medley performance.

Historically, the Video Vanguard award includes a montage that reinforces the recipient’s innovative contributions to the medium. Last night, the segment included no videos from either Destiny’s Child or Beyoncé’s solo career. This absence seemed strange, not only because her surprise fifth album provided corresponding videos for each song, but because Beyoncé was a throwback to blockbuster major label releases from videogenic stars like Madonna and Jackson. This indicates MTV’s programming decision to hand music videos over, first to MTV2 and then to YouTube. It gestures to award shows’ prioritization of live musical performance that can easily be digested into GIFs, #hashtags, and clickbait. It also doubled as a preview for On the Run, her concert film with Jay-Z that will premiere on HBO next month.

Beyoncé’s closing medley was the night’s rare polished performance. It began with a cryptic non-address to those divorce rumors, ended with the singer in an embrace with her family, and went off ***flawlessly. It demonstrated Beyoncé’s industrial power; even MTV couldn’t shake her. It made me wonder what future generations of female performers will learn from her when they reach for the Moon Man. Perhaps they would demand perfection of their stage performances. It also made me imagine what the broadcast would be like if more of Swift and Lorde’s conspiratorial attitude as friends and fellow nominees made it into the ceremony. We’re getting closer with collaborations from Iggy Azalea and Rita Ora, as well as Minaj, Grande, and Jessie J. But “Bang Bang” was so rushed that Minaj distractedly muttered her verse while holding her dress together. Minaj helped breathe new life into “Flawless” this summer. The stage, like feminism, is big enough for Beyoncé to share with her too.

At the end of the day, though, they highlight the fact that the Emmy Awards are a broadcast event, and therefore must be concerned with keeping the attention of broadcast viewers. And in the current televisual age, that means organizing the show in ways that emphasize what wide audiences are actually watching or interested in. Accordingly, the emphasis on presenters (as opposed to what they were presenting) in these on-screen prompts fits in with a larger strategy of making a niche celebration of television production culture seem like a celebration of capital-T Television that viewers across the nation can relate to.

The challenge for Emmy producers is that they are forced to complete this same task with different nominees every year, which requires certain adjustments. In recent years, after the era of The West Wing and The Sopranos, the drama categories have been dominated by shows that most people aren’t watching, with the little-watched Mad Men winning four straight Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series and Lead Actor seeing similar domination from Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. By comparison, comedy has exited a dark period where niche or low-rated comedies like The Office and 30 Rock walked away with the trophy, as Modern Family offers a populist hit with comparatively mass appeal (although its total viewer numbers pale in comparison to the sitcoms dominating its category a decade earlier).

Accordingly, comedy categories opened and closed this year’s Emmy telecast, despite the fact that the only interesting story was happening in the dramatic categories. For those who actually follow the awards, and for whom the evening is a suspenseful reveal after months of speculation, Homeland’s win for Outstanding Drama Series, Lead Actor and Actress in a Drama Series, and Writing in a Drama Series was the story of the evening. Not only does it dethrone Mad Men after its four-year reign and mark the first time since 1993 that a series has won Series, Lead Actor and Lead Actress in a single year, but it also signals Showtime’s first ever Series win at the Emmys, becoming only the third cable channel to win a Series award (after HBO and AMC). But Homeland draws a small audience, limited by access to premium cable, and so Modern Family’s predictable win for Outstanding Comedy Series closes the evening as a celebration of television that people watching have actually seen (and, not entirely coincidentally, television on the broadcast network that happened to be airing this year’s Emmy telecast).

This seems to fly in the face of the prevailing discourse surrounding the current era of television, which is often heralded for its serious dramatic programming—most often on cable—by those who suggest we are in a golden age (a notion Damian Lewis echoed in his speech, making me reach for the bingo card I drew into the back of my copy of Newman and Levine’s Legitimating Television); However, while the very existence of the Emmys as a judgment of art would seem to offer proof of this claim, the Emmys telecast can actively work against the exclusivity of those definitions. Although no broadcast series made it into the Outstanding Drama Series category, eight made it into the montage of eighteen series that marked the beginning of the drama period of the telecast, only one of which was nominated for a single award given out during that telecast (CBS’ The Good Wife, with three acting nominations). And yet House, Once Upon a Time, Grey’s Anatomy, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Revenge, Smash, and NCIS all have something in common: more people have probably seen them than any of the series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series. Heck, more people watch NCIS weekly than the six shows nominated in that category combined.

These montages may not seem as important as the winners, and they certainly aren’t likely to be part of news reports or historical records regarding the telecast, but they capture a different way in which the Emmys serve as a discursive space for the contested meaning of television quality. Although we normally think about winners and losers, or even nominees, as the primary space in which the Emmys reinforce or establish certain hierarchies of quality, we also need to think about the broadcast itself as a push back against those hierarchies, particularly given the ongoing battle between the broadcast networks and the Academy regarding the Movie/Miniseries category (which privileges HBO, who won four out of seven awards in the category, with the other two going to basic cable programs). Next year, the Supporting Acting categories for Movies and Miniseries are disappearing, leaving more time for genres that remain part of the industrial structures of broadcast television, and therefore genres that the networks paying to air the awards are more invested in.

In other words, it wasn’t a coincidence that only three of the eighteen series featured during the broadcast’s comedy montage were from cable networks (and all of them from HBO, with no representation from nominated series from Showtime—Nurse Jackie—and FX—Louie—within the evening’s broadcast). It was a statement that comedy is and always will be a broadcast genre, even though they could have easily selected another six great cable comedies to achieve the relative parity they sought in drama series. Like the choice to lead and close with comedy, it’s the broadcast networks’ way of marking their territory: while the battle for drama might seem lost, the war for comedy wages on, and it will be fought in the editing bays and production booths as much as in the voting ballots.

Although you might have blogged or tweeted on this topic elsewhere, we’d like you to share your opinions and critique with us here. What was your take on the nominees and which winners surprised you? What aspects of the awards show were particularly exciting or provocative? What aspects fell short? Did Jimmy Fallon’s performance as host pale in comparison to shows past? Was the use of tweeted introductions for presenters successful or just gimmicky? What did you make of this big night for Primetime Emmy first-timers, and the ousting of shows like 30 Rock and The Amazing Race from their award winning thrones? Any particularly sentimental, awkward, or hysterical moments worth commenting on? What’s not being discussed by critics and colleagues that should be, and what’s being given much more attention than deserved?

Let us know what you think. . .