THE BEST

30 Rock Takes the Evening
With wins for writing, Tim Conway's guest starring role (Carrie Fisher should have won too), Alec Baldwin's and Tina Fey's performances, and Best Comedy, the under-watched NBC sitcom was well recognized for being the most delightful and hilarious show on television. Tina Fey got a nice long plug in about the very many ways in which the show can be watched (Hulu.com, iTunes, Verizon phones, actual TV sometimes) and hopefully, unlike last year, all of these wins will drive people toward it. Though, part of me doubts it because the show is just too weird and too clever for some folks. No condescension meant there, just... you know. Different strokes for different folks.

Ricky Gervais, Steve Carell, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert Bring the Funny
The five reality show host um... hosts weren't really doing their job, so it was up to these four men to make us chortle. (Though Conan O'Brien, Amy Poehler, and Fey were also amusing). The prune joke was wonderful, and the Gervais/Carell stand-off was a hoot (if a bit too drawn out). Oh, and Steve Martin's Tommy Smuthers introduction was pretty wonderful too.

Tony Shaloub and Boston Legal Won Nothing
Yay! Finally!

Bryan Cranston's Big Upset
A longtime also-ran for Malcom in the Middle, Cranston scored big last night for his work on Breaking Bad, a small half hour long AMC drama about a dying high school science teacher who decides to start making meth in order to leave his family with some money. The award was supposed to go to Hugh Laurie or Jon Hamm, and the latter seemed surprised in a genuinely kind and excited way when Cranston's name was read. Breaking Bad has been a critical success, so here's hoping that people will actually tune in now that its star has been fabulously be-awarded.

Paul Giamatti's Acceptance Speech Oops
"I'd like to thank my wife. Not my actual wife! My fake wife. Laura. Laura Linney." Shot of his actual wife manager cringing. Where was his "actual wife"?

THE WORST

5 Reality Hosts Do Not Equal One Ellen or Conan
The five hosts—Tom Bergeron, Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum, Ryan Seacrest, and Jeff Probst (some sort of seminar lineup at the Learning Annex in Hades)—were so terrifically awful that you wanted the damn accountants to come back out and talk again. From the opening bit in which they had "nothing" planned to those awful "look! old TV show sets" bits to the Heidi Klum "this is drama" feinting thing, it was just so embarrassingly unfunny and wrong that you had to shake your head and wonder why they didn't just fill a dump truck up with money and drive it to Ellen DeGeneres' house. The whole thing was rescued only a little bit by Jimmy Kimmel's reality show competition vote off motif joke when it came time to name the winner of the Emmys' first ever reality show host award (for which all five hosts were nominated). Probst won. Meh.

"They Used Words —"
That dude who won for writing John Adams totally got cut off while trying to make a reasonable political point about old-timey politicians' knack for rhetoric that was full of substance and power. Ah well. At least they didn't cut off the hosts for making a fucking Seinfeld joke. (And, hey!, at least Laura Linney's pointed "community organizers" line got through.)

Josh Groban's TV Cabaret Hour
Josh Groban came out and wasted approximately 103 minutes of our time by singing the theme songs to many, many television shows. You can watch it here if you dare. It's really spectacularly weird and off-putting. Like Josh Groban himself!

The Wire Wins Nothing
Not even the lousy writing award which was, well, all the terrific and now-over HBO crime drama was nominated for.

The 'In Memoriam' Section Fails to Honor the Death of Entourage
I'd totally "Hi-Yo!" that one except that Jeremy Piven won yet again for doing the same yelling and swearing shtick he's been doing for four or five (who knows) seasons. Blahhh.

In An Effort to Stay Current, the Academy Gives Inexplicable Air Time to Lauren Conrad
Aside from her presenting duties, the Hills star got a whole chunk of time by herself to talk about the Emmy escort ladies dresses that she "designed." Somewhere Don Rickles made a joke about a bottle of chloroform and the backseat of a 1957 DeSoto sedan.

The Cast of Desperate Housewives
They just sincerely piss me off.

Mary Tyler Moore's Missing Sleeves
I know. It's terrible. But now I've said it. Um, dag.

So that's that. What did you like, what did you hate? Any winners you were thrilled about? Any that made you miserable (other than all of them)? Oh, and NB: They were the lowest-rated Emmys in history. Yikes! Of and if you're too busy to read all this, just click here for a really quick recap of all the awkward moments.

• 10 Plots and Subplots to Watch After Today's Big Announcements [Defamer]

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

• EW.com lists the 15 Most Brilliant Moments and manages to find some joy in the ending.
• New York Magazine has exhaustive, point-by-point commentary and a list of unanswered questions.
• The Baltimore Sun, which was heavily (too heavily, perhaps) focused on this season, was unhappy with this "once great" series' finale. Seems they maybe didn't like being depicted as Pulitzer hungry fabulists.
• The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley loved the ambiguity and uncertainty of the series. Oh, and she manages to bizarrely equate The Wire to that show Numb3rs.
• Slate counted down their Top 13 Moments.
• The Onion's AV Club has an interview with David Simon, who talks about his new miniseries Generation Kill, and waxes dramatically about The Wire's connections to Shakespeare, O'Neill, and Chekhov.

Season 1, song: "Step by Step" by Jesse Winchester

Season 2, song: "I Feel Alright" by Steve Earle

Season 3, song: "Fast Train" by Solomon Burke

Season 4, song: "Walk On Gilded Splinters" by Paul Weller

Season 5, song: "Way Down In The Hole" by Blind Boys of Alabama

The finale of The Wire airs on HBO, this Sunday at 8pm.

Related: Cults - Worship The Wire after this four-minute indoctrination!

More: Barack Obama: He's Just Like Us! (Us Weekly)

Chris Partlow, the drug lord's enforcer in HBO's The Wire, will cut you. No, really. Here's actor Gbenga Akinnagbe, who plays the part; photographer Nikola forgot to request the scary assassin look.

Gaius Charles is "Smash" Williams in Friday Night Lights, an actor recently profiled in New York magazine. Why is such a cosmopolitan magazine taking a lowly-rated show about college football, and a fictional running back, under its wing? New York's Adam Moss explains: Friday Night Lights is "sports for gays and women". And Neel Shah.

James Truman, former editor director of Louise MacBain's luxury magazine hobby collection, has the inner peace of a yoga devotee, and a man who will never again have to cater to the French-Canadian divorcee's whims. (Related: MacBain's Culture & Travel.is running a three-year-old account of a trip to Myanmar by obnoxious fallen Star editor, Joe Dolce.)

Emily Gould, another former Gawker writer now lost to management, is now consulting on blogs to Jewcy, the site for hip jews. Emily is way too hip for Jewish traditions. Piglet. Yum!

Another unkosher combination: Emily Gould and (head at regulation tilt) Julia Allison. Says Gould: "What can I say? I like her."

A piglet, desecrated by New York's Jesse Oxfeld. Or vice versa. Whatever.

Rachel Sklar of the Huffington Post, with her date, Raymond Roker of Urb magazine. They met at a Jewish retreat. The pork's better here.

Brits Eddie Izzard, Alan Cumming and Rachel Weisz watched fellow countryman, Daniel Day-Lewis, win the award for best actor. They're over the moon. Can't you tell? (Weisz, who won best supporting actress for her role in The Constant Gardener, was photographed later in the evening, at cabaret club The Box.)

To the right of Noelle Hancock from pagesix.com: Jessica Coen, overlady of New York magazine's blogs. The former Gawker writer looks like a sweet girl from the Midwest in this picture. Once, she was.

Hud Morgan of Men's Vogue learned how to wear scarves from his former boss at the New York Daily News, Lloyd Grove, seen here with New York's Carl Swanson (left).

Deborah Schoeneman, the former gossip columnist and Hamptons diarist, now writes TV scripts in Los Angeles. Does she miss New York? "In LA, writers actually make money; and they're happy." Smug bitch.

Waiting for Emily Gould.

It's gay Christmas. Public displays of affection between the gays are permitted only at The Cock and during the Oscars. New York's Carl Swanson and boyfriend cuddle around the telecast.

More rejoicing gays: New York's David Haskell and his boyfriend, Esteban Arboleda.

One straight couple, Noelle Hancock and New York Times reporter, Nick Confessore, didn't know the rules.

Curbed "lord" Lockhart Steele got name-checked in Page Six's party report. Jessica Coen, like aspiring starlets before her, is only with him for the reflected celebrity.

Photos by Nikola Tamindzic

First, Simon has turned his focus on his former employer, the Baltimore Sun; in newspaper terms, he's too close to the story, and the latest season's parable on the decline of the press, complete with irredeemable journalistic fabricator and empty-souled news executives, is leaden. Maybe the dockers and gangsters of earlier seasons were also less textured than the real Baltimore personalities on which they were based, but they didn't have an outlet for their complaints. Journalists do, and that has colored the reception to The Wire's latest storyline.

There's a deeper problem, which should establish why a feature, even a prequel, is such a bad idea. The saving grace of The Wire was the series' leisurely, meandering, convoluted plotline: Simon had no deadline for his political diatribes; his righteousness never overwhelmed the essential drama of crime and corruption in America's decaying industrial cities. But now the crusading former journalist has only a condensed final season, three episodes shorter than he'd hoped, in which to make all his remaining points, and demand recognition for a show which has never won a major award.

The result: embarrassingly improbable plot points, such as the fake serial killer conjured up by McNulty to shake down the mayor for police funding; absurd caricatures, particularly of journalists (see below); increasingly heavy-handed lectures on the bankruptcy of government, the press, heck, everybody; and a cascade of newspaper columns by Simon as part of the show's last-ditch marketing campaign, belaboring points which viewers should arrive at themselves. It's painful to admit: The Wire's creator has turned into one of those didactic lecturers who simply rattle out the script and raise the volume when they feel the audience slipping away from them, and the clock running out.

David Simon has struggled to compress his concluding remarks into the 10 episodes of the HBO show's fifth run. Imagine how painful it would be for him to fit his morality play into two hours of a feature movie. It would be better for him, and fans of earlier seasons, if he didn't.

• Otherwise levelheaded Owen Wilson and scientologist Will Smith are being "driv[en] ... crazy" by Men's Vogue, which totally promised them the cover. [Daily News]
• Omar from The Wire can't get his posse into his own premiere party, even after he starts whistling "Farmer in the Dell." [NYP]
• At CNBC, Erin Burnett's bosses make it known she can discreetly accept jet rides from plutocrats like Maria, but not so much with the actual published list of demands for sugar daddies. [NYP]

[YouTube via TVTattle]

Since I’m in New York, let me say it: there is no city more vain about it’s position in popular culture, more indifferent to other realities, more self absorbed than New York City. I’m mean, you guys have a lot going on and there are a lot of wonderful stories to be told, but you literally think you have the end thing to say... the enth degree to what to say on every single one of them; and Baltimore has ten times your crime rate, five times your rate of intravenous drug addiction, five times your rate of poverty. And yet, because all the Wall Street money went here in the eighties and the nineties on that great run... and there is no more hell in Alphabet City and Morningside Heights is being gentrified.

I mean, Manhattan is one big pile of money, and so you guys think you know urban America and you don’t know shit anymore! I’m starting to get a little pissed off and I don’t mean to be... [laughter]

When Homicide was published as a book, it was the only time they ever... it wasn’t because I’m a great guy, it’s because they let me in the homicide unit. I was really lucky. But, this book comes out, and the New York Times would not review it at first, because they said it was a regional book. The New Yorker actually did a long review and then they came back and wrote a little brief... but, we’ve always had the problem in Baltimore. ...

There is a tonality to how you guys accept stories... that cover of the New Yorker where, you know, where it’s like New Jersey and then China... that, that is you and an awful lot of really fine story telling doesn’t permeate, and what’s going on in Baltimore is that we’ve been doing it so long and have so many hours of television under our belt that eventually enough people have found it that we can’t go away anymore. But, um, there really is... it’s very hard piercing the New York and LA axis, and it’s very hard for anything to be good because everybody that is writing is writing what they know. What the hell do you know if...

I mean God bless Richard Price because he lives in Manhattan, but he actually crosses the river to go to Jersey City. That’s why (indecipherable) is so good, because he left the fucking island; and I gotta say, you know, all the shows that look like LA and New York... I’ve gone off now. I’ve really lost it [laughter].

I mean, here is a fact... an honest to God fact: last year, there were more corpses on the three Law & Order franchises, which were all set in Manhattan... there were more dead people shown on that show than there were actual homicides in Manhattan.

[via Eebmore]

The episode was littered with allusions to the state of media both glaring ("The bigger the lie, the more they believe" said one cop of his interrogation methods) and subtle (the last scene, Bunk reading the Sun, commenting on McNulty the "prodigal son." Get it??) How effective this little-seen show (it attracts approximately 11 regular viewers) will be in making the rickety old papes penitent in any way may be in question, but there are certainly lessons to be learned here. Reflected back to us is a world where the latest batch of dope is called Greenhouse Gas - "It's hot!" - and dead eyed newspaper staffers stare at a distant urban fire with shrugging passivity. Indeed something somewhere is burning, and David Simon and Co. continue to tease at the source, blowing plumes of necessary smoke our way.

Oh, and Aiden Gillen's resemblance to Tea Leoni continues to alarm.

It's an exciting time to be us. This week's Weddings/Celebrations section was just chock full of grade A couples. We had a punk rock Roosevelt whose first date with her hubbie-to-be was at a Rancid show, a former blogger who married an "infused maple syrup" heiress, a Hindu/Muslim wedding and Susan Green and Adam Greene, who, unbelievably enough, were married by a rabbi named David E. Greenberg. But that wasn't the cream of the crop.

Yes, it was Donnie Andrews—who inspired the character Omar Little on "The Wire"—and Fran Boyd who, despite murdering someone and turning tricks for drugs respectively, came out on top of our patented ranking system.

Donnie Andrews, Fran Boyd:

In 1987, Mr. Andrews was sentenced to life in prison for murdering a man on the troubled streets of West Baltimore: -2
At the time, Ms. Boyd, a former junkie, said she got high on heroin and exchanged sex for other drugs: -2
In April 2005, Mr. Andrews's was released after 17 and a half years of time served: +10
In the ensuing years, Ms. Boyd, guided by the steady influence of Mr. Andrews, began standing firmly on her own feet. She became a guardian for two nieces and a nephew, while providing for her own two sons. She began doing outreach work for drug addicts at New Hope Treatment Center in West Baltimore, a methadone clinic associated with Bon Secours Hospital: +10
Andrew is the basis for a character Omar Little, on "The Wire," which is every white person in the media's favorite T.V. show: +15
Among those at the wedding were Mr. Simon, the executive producer, writer and creator of "The Wire," and the cast members Dominic West, who plays Detective James McNulty; Sonja Sohn, who plays Detective Shakima Greggs; and Andre Royo, who plays Bubbles: +5

Total: 36

There is also the challenge of following the localized black dialect that the program tries to represent as faithfully as it does its other details. In the Baltimore ghetto, yo is both a salutation and the third-person singular pronoun; "feel me," means "listen to what I'm telling you"; and the ubiquitous use of bitch has mostly replaced the N-word.

Just to make sure you've fully contextualized that information, Weisberg ends the piece by using one of those difficult phrases in a sentence that also reveals his deep knowledge of the inner city:

This refusal to give up in the face of defeat is the reality of ghetto life as well. Feel me: It's what The Wire is all about.

We feel you, Jake. In fact, it makes us wanna holler.

The Wire on Fire [Slate]

"This season of 'The Wire' will knock the breath out of you." The New York Times, September 9

"One of television's most challenging series" — The New York Times, September 9

"If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch "The Wire," unless, that is, he was already writing for it." The New York Times, September 10

"'The Wire,' Rap That's Pure Baltimore" — The New York Times, September 10

Update: Joe Hagan has a theory about the Times' all-Wire-all-the-time coverage.