I enjoyed the Emmys last night in large part because I had actually watched a number of the winners – The Crown, Mare of Easttown, Hacks, Ted Lasso – and enjoyed most of them. I am not a huge fan of the last because along with niceness it seems to exalt cluelessness – or, worse, suggest that the two are inseparable. I did wonder what happened to Real Time with Bill Maher (though I suspect I know) and the much more correct Better Things. Working without Alan Arkin, the once-excellent The Kominsky Method barely deserved its nomination.
We started watching The Crown with its most recent season and enjoyed it so much we went back to the first, which was even better. The writing and the acting– especially in the episode in which Prince Philip meets the astronauts – were on a level with The Sopranos. I was very sorry Tobias Menzies wasn’t there last night as I wanted to hear if the nasally voice was his own.
And I enjoyed Mare of Easttown once I got used to the almost unrelenting bleakness. I liked it even better when I learned that the writer, Brad Inglesby, was a graduate of Villanova, my alma mater.
