The Emmys began late due to a mess of a football game, where the New York Jets managed to sneak out a victory after setting team records for penalties and penalty yards. It was an omen for the night to come, where any objective referee would have penalized Ken Ehrlich and his production team on countless occasions. From the moment the ceremony began with an aimless sequence where the Emmy production team proved their ability to edit footage from various television shows together into fake conversations between television characters, it was clear that this was an evening set to celebrate television in the most misguided of ways.

It was unfortunate for the show’s producers there was no clear narrative that emerged out of the night’s winners: the Netflix ascension never materialized, Breaking Bad expanded its trophy case with wins for the show and Anna Gunn but didn’t dominate as it could have, and Modern Family went unrepresented in acting categories for the first time but nonetheless won the one that matters, Outstanding Comedy Series. It means the telecast itself becomes the narrative, and a rather unpleasant one at that.

There were the special eulogies for individuals who had passed on, which drew controversy for selective criteria in advance of the ceremony and criticism from viewers and winners—Modern Family’s Steven Levitan—for giving the evening a somber tone. There was the choice to maintain the audio feed in the theater for the In Memoriam segment itself, enabling the always tacky “Applause Meter” to judge the level of celebrity on display. There was the nonsensical appearance of Elton John to perform a new song that “reminds him” of Liberace only to attempt to justify his appearance given his nonexistent relationship to television. There was the excruciating opening segment that transitioned from the aforementioned pre-taped sequence to a lazy Saturday Night Live monologue where a parade of previous Emmy hosts were wasted right up until the point Tina Fey and Amy Poehler momentarily wrestled the show from its imminent doom.

And yet it was the look back in television history to the year 1963 that best encapsulates the broadcast’s problems. Combining a superfluous performance of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” from Carrie Underwood with a Don Cheadle-delivered retelling of a tumultuous year in our history, it sought to position television at the forefront of culture. It was television that helped the nation heal about JFK’s death, gave Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” resonance, made The Beatles the phenomenon they would become, and—in an awful segue—continues to serve as the launching pad for musical acts like Underwood. Anyone with an understanding of history—yet alone media scholars—would have scrawled all over their script, which fails to cite sources to support any of these overly simplistic claims.

In addition to this problem, however, it was also a sequence that implicitly argued the Emmys exist not simply to acknowledge the best in television, but also to reaffirm to us that television is an important part of society, and that—according to Television Academy chairman Bruce Rosenblum during his annual spiel—the Academy is there 365 days a year to help make this “golden age of television” a reality. This rhetoric was also evident in the sequence where Diahann Carroll read a prepared statement about her impact as the first African American actress nominated for an Emmy, turning over the microphone to Scandal’s Kerry Washington; it was the Emmys touting their progressivism, a noble gesture that does not change the dramatic underrepresentation of men and women of color both at the Emmys and on TV in general, and does not magically transform the Television Academy into the Peabody Awards overnight.

The Emmys are at their worst when they feel as though they are about the Emmys. As someone who has over time accumulated a wealth of knowledge about the Emmy Awards as an institution, I reveled in Ellen Burstyn joking about the screen time for her previous nomination and often found Ken Ehrlich’s broadcast fascinating in its tone deafness, but its ultimate failure is both undeniable and unfortunate when I consider the worthy—if, yes, also wealthy—winners whose personal and professional triumphs were overshadowed by the spectacle or lack thereof around them.

The most frustrating detail was in the special choreography segment featured in the broadcast’s final hour. For most viewers, the routine inspired by nominated series was representative of the hokey, misguided production numbers elsewhere in the broadcast. However, for me it was a rare case of one of the Creative Arts categories—consigned to a previous ceremony, which this year aired as a tape-delayed, edited two hours on FXX—being elevated to the main stage, with the choreographers—many of whom I respect based on their work on reality stalwart So You Think You Can Dance—nominated for their work in television being given an expansive platform for their work and an acknowledgment of their labor.

Whereas FXX’s broadcast only acknowledged nominees for guest acting awards, and aired only small portions of winners’ already short speeches, for a brief moment the Academy recognized the work of choreographers at the Emmys itself; it was unfortunate that what surrounded it so diminished the meaning of the performance. It was a broadcast that prioritized promotable musical acts at the expense of time for television professionals to accept their awards, so busy performing the “importance of television” that it forgot what—or who—actually makes television, if that was something the Academy even knew in the first place.

Thank you, thank you very much,
I can’t express it any other way.
For with this awful trembling in my heart,
I just can’t find another thing to say.

I’m happy that you liked the show,
I’m grateful you liked me.
And I’m sure to you the tribute seemed quite right.
But if you knew of all the years,
Of hopes and dreams and tears
You’d know it didn’t happen overnight.
Huh, overnight!

I imagine these words whispered back to all the moving tributes from family, friends, and fans of Alex Doty, an influential scholar whose generosity exceeded any metrics of greatness and whose untimely passing will be mourned by many generations of scholars to come. These words I use because they preface a lyric with which Alex introduced himself: “I was born in a trunk at the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho.” But I also use them here because they were first uttered by one of Alex’s own early inspirations, Judy Garland, in the same number in the same film, A Star is Born (1954), which also happens to be the year in which Alex was born.

Alex with friend and colleague Mary Gray who he helped lasso into participating in my Console-ing Passions panel this year.

I did not know him personally as many of you did, nor do I share the library of memories you may have of him. But I wanted to write a piece about how his life and his work has inspired my own as a young academic to demonstrate the ways in which, like such diva figures as Judy Garland, he will continue to inform and empower young queer individuals such as myself long after his or my time.

The first article I ever presented in a graduate seminar and one of the first queer theory pieces I ever read, was the first chapter of his book Making Things Perfectly Queer entitled “There’s Something Queer Here.” I found myself fervently and excitedly highlighting passages as though they’d been written especially for me and jotting them down on a legal pad so as not to lose them in the sea of other articles I was struggling to read week after week.

I come back to it often and reference enough of his other work that Alex seems to hold a consistent spot in my bibliographies. Indeed this chapter made me recall one of the first moments in which a media text informed my own struggle with sexuality and the feelings of difference I was beginning to experience as a young child raised in a rural, homophobic environment, which I wrote about later that fall:

“I can, with great clarity, remember the precise moment when everything fell into place: I sit motionless on the couch, staring at the TV, images flickering before my glazed but pensive adolescent eyes. Bewitched is on, and I’m left alone in the dark basement, sheltered and away from the homophobia and hate shouted at me all day in school. I’m in a sort of meditative state—receptive to what I’m watching, laughing on cue, performing my role as the audience but understanding only the face value. Something snaps, and I think, ‘Why should she have to hide a part of herself to fit in?’ And then there comes this single, beautiful, intimate moment. My eyes water, my nostrils flare, and I breathe out a sigh as I begin to smile. Samantha is me.”

I did not have the language at that young age to describe my experience of Bewitched as a queer reading nor did I give any other interpretation of it much more than a passing thought. I might not have understood what sexual identity meant or in what ways I was different, but something about dissolving myself into Samantha’s colorful world with her unwed, flamboyant, and powerful mother along with a parade of queer magical beings made me covet life outside her broom closet. These sorts of reading strategies–of finding or making a space for queerness on television (perhaps not strategies at all)–are not, as Alex writes, “‘alternative’ readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along.”

Building on Alex’s influence, I am launched into scholarship invested in finding other rural queer individuals and relaying their stories of using the media for identity work. Drawing from a pool of other reception scholars, Alex encourages the use of ethnographic work to re-imagine the audience not within pre-established categories but rather to investigate their daily life and how they integrate media into it. Putting the “I” back in our work in feminist tradition and being reflexive of our own media practices and subjectivities, as Matt Hills argues, is useful in conveying “the tastes, values, attachments, and investments” of the communities from which we write that our own voices can help illuminate. These are the stakes involved in our research, and as Alex himself writes defending his use of the word queer, “I want to recapture and reassert a militant sense of difference [and] suggest that within cultural production and reception, queer erotics are already part of culture’s erotic center.”

Alexander Doty presented on what he called the "Beefcake Paradigm" at Console-ing Passions 2012. He noticed a challenging of dominant understandings of narcissism as feminine, and that men in such shows as Spartacus, Jersey Shore, and Ultimate Fighting Championship were attempting to assert conventional masculinity while allowing themselves and others to admire men's bodies, often themselves engaging in queer behavior.

My future in research will be difficult as it cannot rely on essentializing or over-theorized assumptions about audiences and does not have many precedents from which to be informed. I am often subject to a feeling of “imposter syndrome” and constantly worry that I will be “found out” as a fraud. In our email exchanges, however, Alex’s magnanimous generosity with me by showing interest in my work has and will continue to make me feel as though I’m on the right track. Found in the lyrics that open this post, which I imagine to be true of Alex’s life, success comes from years of hopes and dreams and tears, “it didn’t happen overnight,” and as I move forward, I like to think I’ll remember and be encouraged by the words that close his song: “This is it kid, sing!”

The Scary Movie franchise obviously owes much to this kind of comedy, yet the films are cruder and dirtier, mostly parodying other movies and inviting viewers to laugh simply by virtue of recognizing what is being mocked.  When Airplane’s Jerry Zucker was hired to direct number three, his would-be trump card was casting Nielsen in a bit part. (It didn’t save the film, but, still, it was a good idea.)  Nielsen also appeared in Scary Movie 4, and his final, posthumous performance will be in Scary Movie 5.  Somehow, it seems unlikely that Nielsen will snag an Oscar like Heath Ledger did.  But it is a sure bet that Nielsen will get a massive round of applause during the “In Memoriam” section of the Oscars, and we can fervently hope for an homage clip reel—anything to offer relief from the Serious and Important movies that dominate the industry’s annual celebration of itself.  Will viewers perhaps even be treated to the finale of Naked Gun 33 1/3, in which Nielsen thwarts a terrorist attempt to blow up the Academy Awards?

Nielsen was not a subtle, interior performer, but we can still classify him as a classic less-is-more comedian.  He didn’t bother with neuroses (Ben Stiller) or infantile bluster (Adam Sandler, Jack Black).  Most contemporary comedies set up some kind of personal problem to be solved.  Black needs to grow up, find a real job, and feel the urge to accomplish something in School of Rock.  Ditto Seth Rogen in Knocked Up and the goofs of Hot Tub Time Machine.  Stiller contends with crazy in-laws in the Fockers franchise.  These plot-driven movies convey some vague notion that their characters have interiority.

Nielsen didn’t mess with such tomfoolery.  All he needed was funny dialogue and his trademark deadpan delivery or wide-eyed reaction shot.  There was also a lot of physical humor; somehow, even when you were sure a stuntman was performing the pratfalls, you still credited Nielsen for the laugh. It wasn’t Shakespeare.  Or Preston Sturges, for that matter.  But it worked.  In the Naked Gun, Nielsen is charged with thwarting a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth.  This naturally ends in a hilarious showdown that includes a Queen lookalike.  By the conclusion of any Naked Gun movie, we can be sure that dignified people will get knocked around, their asses up in the air like Mabel Normand in a Keystone comedy.  There’s no need to waste time with our hero’s “issues.”

Like a comic Vincent Price, Nielsen could waltz through the most absurd set-up and deliver exactly what the script demanded.  He began as a serious actor in films like Forbidden Planet and Tammy and the Bachelor, and in Playhouse 90 productions, so it should come as no surprise that he was a competent professional who knew how to hit his marks, deliver a straight line, fall down, or use a prop in an undignified manner.  But this particular kind of performance—parodic without being cynical, funny without the pretense of sophistication, and sometimes self-effacing, with sight gags funnier than the comedian’s reaction to them—is not what is currently held in highest esteem.

Roger Ebert once called Nielsen “the Olivier of spoofs,” but spoofing is not very fashionable today; rather, it is improvisation that is most highly regarded, and filmmakers like Judd Apatow oblige by laboriously coaxing dialogue from performers rather than scripting the words themselves.  A recent New Yorker article on Steve Carell actually holds up Airplane as an example of “traditional” comedy conveying “a sleekness that calls to mind the typewriter.”  Improv, conversely, should “feel fresh and unstudied…  [with] a skewed specificity that bears the stamp of an actor’s subconscious.”   There’s no doubt that improvised comedy is often terrific, and infinitely better than the canned stuff of, say, Two and a Half Men.  Yet the idea that the scripted Airplane is somehow inherently stale and studied strikes me as snobby and—even worse—humorless.  Carell is brilliantly intuitive, and presented with a single prop (a boiled lobster) and simple instructions (“be funny!”) he could probably surpass Nielsen in improvising a hilarious routine.  In Naked Gun 2 ½, Nielsen just follows the script.  As he digs into a lobster, lemons fly through the air, the lobster’s giant claw accidentally clamps down on a lady’s booby, and Nielsen accidentally smacks Barbara Bush right in the kisser, sending her flying.  This tightly scripted, choreographed scene is executed like a Rube Goldberg Machine.  And that’s why it’s funny.

With Nielsen gone, where will Barbara Bush and Queen Elizabeth lookalikes find work, and suffer massive indignities?  Where will viewers yearning for a good fart joke unencumbered by the stamp of the actor’s subconscious turn?  After a long day, with a pizza in front of you and a cold beer in your hand, would you really rather see Seth Rogen learn to stop smoking pot and be a good dad than Leslie Nielsen reenacting the Untouchables homage to the Battleship Potemkin staircase sequence?  Surely not.  And don’t call me Shirley.