The lack of crowd response led Harrelson to dub it “too much of an inside joke,” but it was far from the only joke that seemed designed for those who spend their waking hours scouring industry trade press (or, to put a finer point on it, for me). I got the joke, and a good portion of my self-selected Twitter feed got the joke, and I even got the subtextual joke of McConaughey and Harrelson presenting the award many expected they’d be competing for until True Detective switched categories. However, one imagines the presumed mass audience of television viewers tuning into this year’s ceremony had no idea what Harrelson was referring to, just as they were confused by Seth Meyers’ jokes about Orange is the New Black’s category switching, or by Julianna Margulies’ pointed “22 episodes a year” reference in her acceptance speech, or by the words “Tatiana Maslany” in the Billy on the Street pre-taped segment.

The internal politics of the Emmy Awards are a rich discursive space, one that plays out each year in the nominating process, the nominations, and then the broadcast itself. Months of trade publication ad campaigns, Gold Derby Google Hangouts, and talk show appearances all converge in a single evening, and for those who follow that narrative it becomes a game of seeing whose submission tape won over the voters and how a show’s win in one category could signal a win in a different category later in the show. As one of those people, the Emmys broadcast is a dynamic experience, a vessel within which existing television industry narratives—the rise of Netflix, the miniseries/limited series debate, the “dramedy” problem—are highlighted, complicated, and narrativized. Although who wins may not actually “matter,” it is nonetheless part of the process by which the television industry understands itself, and thus a piece in the puzzle of how we understand the television industry.

However, the Emmys rarely present themselves in this way: instead, they are a celebration of television, heralding the greatness of the medium in this golden era. But this year’s ceremony made no effort to narrativize the year in television beyond a brief opening countdown and a Weird Al Yankovic theme song parody medley, even eschewing the typical tributes to each genre as the ceremony moves from section to section. The show’s lack of flow—including the In Memoriam beginning with no introduction—left no room for any attempt to make it all mean something more than a collection of subjective evaluations of television quality mixed in with jokes for people who read Deadline, a choice that made the awards feel remarkably niche despite the fact that broadcast series performed surprisingly well, in opposition to Meyers’ monologue joke about cable and Netflix’s dominance.

The lack of an effort to hail a more mainstream audience was particularly confusing when Television Academy president Bruce Rosenblum emerged for his speech about the state of the medium of television, the one moment in the show dedicated to the kind of self-narrativizing we’re used to seeing in other elements of the broadcast. However, Rosenblum delivered his speech as Sofia Vergara stood on a rotating platform as eye candy to distract us from this typical, “boring” award show ritual. The objectification of the bit was concerning, particularly given Rosenblum’s specific comments regarding the increased diversity of the Academy mashed up with Vergara’s “This is what it’s like in America” banter, but it was also puzzling given that the rest of the broadcast seemed designed for an audience tuned into the industrial logics surrounding multi-platform viewing.

The narrative of any given award show has always been discursive, determined by the winners and how those winners are spun by the press: you could sense the headlines changing as the night went on, with Modern Family and Breaking Bad’s continued success drowning out the possible “Rise of Netflix” or “Movie Stars on TV” narratives that were carried into the ceremony. The latter offered the broadcast’s most concentrated reference point, although one that was more reinforced by Jimmy Kimmel’s brief hosting takeover, Comedy Directing winner Gail Mancuso’s eye contact with McConaughey during her acceptance speech, and Julia Roberts’ inflection during her presenting gig than by any element of the production itself. In the absence of a production-sponsored narrative, narratives sprung from other elements of the evening, diving further into inside baseball territory as the night wore on.

It also, at least in my experience, amplified the role of social media in shaping these narratives. As following award shows on Twitter becomes a more accepted—if not necessarily mainstream—practice, it becomes a subsequent space through which award show broadcasts are translated. What would have historically been post-show overviews by trade press or major newspapers becomes color commentary and factual details that work in real time to transform the chaos of subjectivity into disappointment, excitement, surprise, or any other narrative imaginable. And when the broadcast itself is making minimal effort to contribute to that narrative itself or pull it away from the specifics of winners and losers, social media emerges to fill the gap for those choosing to view the show in a connected setting.

There is an argument to be made for an understated Emmys broadcast, especially given it came in at exactly three hours, but it creates a vacuum of meaning that needs to be explored further. While this results in some broad pro/con narratives in the context of the popular press, it also reminds us of the Academy’s disinterest in highlighting issues of race or gender in the context of their broadcast, and pushes us to continue exploring the identity politics—or lack thereof—of award shows that in their absence of narrative invites us to construct our own based on their disparate component parts and the filters through which we engage with them.

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.

How to be a Gentleman was a classic example of poor execution, and as a result, just utterly awful television. Audiences realized this, didn’t watch, and it was quickly removed from the schedule. I don’t think the concept was inherently worse than others, but this show was painful to watch, unfunny, not at all smart. No meaningful lessons about the state of men in this.

Man Up began airing a bit later than most and is just, well, … meh. The show offers glimpses of the inner lives of men, but never with much complexity. It is oddly cast and acted, so that the tone of the series is really unclear. The show isn’t offensive so much as uninspired and cliché. I’d categorize it as trying to ride the tide of interest in shifting constructions of masculinity, but not offering much to engage with, and doubtful to return for a second season.

The surprise of the supposed tidal wave of men in crisis shows, at least for me, has been Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing, which isn’t bad and actually a kind of sweet little show (not that “sweet” is a particularly critical assessment). Sitcom history is not being redefined here, but the show is nuanced in its working through of what it constructs as generational shifts in dominant masculinities. A direct link can be drawn from Allen’s “Tim the Tool Man Taylor” Home Improvement character, a character Robert Hanke excellently critiqued as exemplary of a “mock-macho” masculinity, to the one on offer here. Age has softened the patriarchal perspective that Allen’s Mike Baxter-character voices, and importantly, his boss, played by Hector Elizando, at Outdoor Man—a Cabela’s-like hunting/sporting good store that previously allowed Baxter to traverse the world on catalog photo shoots—more often plays the patriarchal heavy, although both are clearly men who are artifacts of a world gone by.

The show doesn’t harbor undue nostalgia toward a more patriarchal past; instead Mike tries to make sense of his sense of norms relative to a world he now lives in—a gyneco-centric home that he seems more a visitor in than master of. Mike shares his home with three adult/young adult daughters, his wife, and a toddler grandson, creating a very different dynamic than Home Improvement’s family of three rambunctious young sons.

My biggest complaint about the series is the simplicity of Mandy, the middle daughter, who so far seems a caricatured dumb, shopping-loving, female teen, while her sisters are more fascinating studies in the range of femininities now available to women. Despite this, I’ve appreciated the adultness of the parental relationship that, in what might be throwaway lines, acknowledges the process of a couple aging together. A recent episode featured Mike saying something about going “for ice cream” which his wife and the audience (as represented through laugh track) seem uncertain of as a possible double entendre. But no, he meant let’s go for ice cream.

Although Mike may huff and puff about as though he’s king of the roost, it is clear this is not the case, and the resolution of episodic tension often works subtly to critique some of the ways the world works now without supporting the view that Mike’s patriarchal old way is any better. If anything, this connects the series more with the father/adult son tensions evident in Parenthood, Rescue Me, Men of a Certain Age, or Sons of Anarchy, among others, than with sitcoms debuting this fall.

From the vantage of a few months into the season, it seems the trend pieces—that also included men in Free Agents (cancelled) and Up All Night with what were termed “wimpy,” “emasculated,” or “loser” depictions of men—overestimated the phenomenon. ABC’s Work It, featuring victims of the “mancession” dressing as women, is scheduled for a January 3^rd debut. Stay tuned, but my suspicion is that its tenure might not match How to be a Gentleman.

*Update: Since submission of this post, Man Up has been pulled from the ABC schedule.*