No, Thanks

On Sunday the Emmys were held, and if I know anything about it I have my aggressively live-tweeting friends to be thankful for. If they were content to live in the moment, I'm sure I'd be ignorant of the whole thing now. Certainly I was content to be ignorant of it. There aren't very many shows that I have made any effort to watch with regularity. This has really always been the case, with the exception of the stretch of time during which I had cable and a DVR.

Not only did people issue a real-time comment on every single thing that drew their attention (instead of, I assume, speaking to the friends at least some of them must have been watching the broadcast with), they did so almost invariably with a negative slant. I find it rather puzzling that someone would dislike a show so much and, instead of turning it off, just growing angrier and angrier. I guess I don't get people.

Complaints revolved around a few things. They were, of course, consistently aggrieved over perceived injustice in the distribution of the awards. I assume (again) that they've never watched an awards show. I have, and I've noted that they unfailingly display little interest in issuing their little trophies based on merit. Even if I'd never seen an awards show, I'd guess they weren't fair, because if they were they'd be the exception in life.

People also struck out at the fact that the show itself was not really well-executed, highlighting a number of problems. This is no shock to me either. Awards shows usually try to be both an arbiter of excellence as well as entertainment in their own right in the form of a variety show. You can about an hour doing a fairly reasonable job at either one of those things, but trying to do both seems to always result in a messy, three  or four hour failure.

The solution is easy. You can take the good with the bad gracefully if you insist on watching the show for its entertainment value, or you can wait until the show is over (maybe passing the time by creating something of your own or by spending time with people you care about) and then check the list of winners online. That takes a couple minutes. I prefer to pass on the entertainment as well as the results, but people won't let me.