Intro for September 15, 2025

Dear Gossips,

The 77th Emmys came and went last night, and I think we can all agree that comedian Nate Bargatze did not do a great job as a host. It wasn’t “Jo Koy bad”, he never fully lost the audience, nor did he ever blame the audience for his struggles. However, his “taking money from charity” bit was AWFUL, and absolutely NO ONE liked it.

Bargatze introduced the bit, in which he offered to donate $100,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of America if Emmy winners stayed within a 45-second limit for their acceptance speeches. For every second a winner went over, he would deduct $1,000 from the total, for every second under, he would add $1,000. This is not unlike the time at the 2018 Oscars when Jimmy Kimmel offered the giver of the shortest speech a jet ski (the prize went to costumer designer Mark Bridges for Phantom Thread, he later raffled the jet ski to benefit the Motion Picture & Television Fund).

Had Bargatze simply announced the bit and then checked in, say, at the halfway mark, it might have worked. Unfortunately for him and us, he kept returning to the bit. Like constantly. Like every time the camera cut to Bargatze, he was talking about the f-cking donation tally. It pulled focus from the Emmys and celebrating the making of great television and put it on Bargatze in a way that became increasingly sweaty. The host is the emcee, not the subject of the show. Conan O’Brien understood this, his effort hosting the Oscars earlier this year really felt like a celebration of cinema, because while Conan was IN the bits, he wasn’t the SUBJECT of the bits. Bargatze treated the Emmys like a standup set in which he is the subject, but that’s not what this gig is.

It made for a weirdly hostile evening. There was audience ire at the bit, which tracked across multiple social media platforms including our own live chat on The Squawk, but also cutaways to the audience showed some rather disdainful faces—Taika Waititi was caught on camera sneering when Bargatze brought it up for the millionth time. It was obvious the bit, no matter how well intentioned, just made winners feel they had to speed through their speeches, which is a shame given how many first-time winners there were. It was also very weird that they were SO concerned about the show’s runtime but did absolutely nothing about shockingly long—frequently unfunny—presenter bits. You want to save time on your telecast? Cut the f-cking bits! 

And it made the Emmys feel behind the times. All award shows have wrestled with their runtime, but the Oscars, the preeminent entertainment industry awards show, has recently gotten over their hangup, moved their telecast an hour earlier, and just let the show run long (like the Super Bowl). The Emmys being so hung up on the runtime and doing an obnoxious bit to manage it feels like trailing the Oscars by several years, which despite Bargatze’s solid opening joke about the Emmys as an award being “a good one” but not the Oscars, is weird because TV has generally been leading entertainment for the last twenty years. As movies have sunk increasingly into toxic nostalgia, television has been the home of cutting-edge storytelling, but you would never know that by last night’s telecast.

But it also felt a little like a cop out. Like a way to tell people not to be political without actually saying that. Many of us on the live chat—and across social media—wondered if the charity bit was less about time management and more about speech management, as in the SUBSTANCE of speeches. Not that there weren’t politicized moments—more on that later—but overall, the Emmys felt desperate for “middle America” appeal. Earlier this year, Bargatze told Esquire of bagging the hosting gig:

“Well, the election probably helped. It got Hollywood executives asking: ‘Who doesn’t live in L.A.? Who’s available?’.”

From choosing Nate Bargatze, famous for being a family-friendly, clean comic to host, to having multiple country music stars appear on stage, including Reba McEntire, Lainey Wilson, and Vince Gill, to the weird pressure the charity bit put on keeping speeches short and sweet, you could feel the intention from CBS. They wanted this to be an uncontroversial, middle America-approved edition of the Emmys. And you kind of can’t blame them, given that their parent company, Paramount, just eked through a merger—which maybe probably involved a controversial legal settlement with Donald Trump—and now wants to do another, blatantly anti-trust one.

CBS NEEDED this night to go smoothly. They needed not to upset the vindicative and tort-happy president, never mind there is no appeasing Trump, literally no amount of capitulation is enough capitulation. The charity bit, then, can be seen as a way of controlling the tone of the evening without expressly ordering people not to get political—which has been done at awards shows in the past, and it is incredibly distasteful. It didn’t really work, several winners made political speeches—more on that later, too—but the night DID end on the positive note of announcing that CBS and Bargatze would donate $350,000 to the Boys and Girls Club. At least they got their money.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah