Surprise Winners/Goofy Show Mar This Year's Emmys

It started out nicely enough, but this year’s Emmys quickly turned into a train wreck...both in onstage antics and in some of the inexplicable choices voters made in some of the night’s biggest awards.

Although viewers didn’t know it at the time, the highlight of the evening proved to be the opening number, performed by the animated characters of Stewie and Brian from FOX’s Family Guy. But things went quickly downhill after that.

For the first time, the Emmys were presented “in the round,” meaning half of the stars in attendance had everybody on stage facing away from them throughout the entire evening. Winner James Spader even commented on the poorly designed set-up, saying “I’ve been to thousands and thousands of concerts in my life, and I can tell you, these are the worst seats I’ve ever had!”

Speaking of Spader, just what were Emmy voters thinking when they gave the Best Actor in a Drama nod to him, instead of James Gandolfini...or Hugh Laurie...or even Denis Leary? As stunned as anyone that he won, Spader’s first comments upon reaching the stage were “I feel like I just stole a pile of money from the mob!”

Also leaving viewers scratching their heads was FOX’s handling of several instances of profanity by those in attendance, choosing to cut away to a still of the room’s ceiling as opposed to just cutting the audio (which they did) or just inserting a bleep over the offending footage. The cut-away occurred three times during the program – first when presenter Ray Romano used an off-color word in a joke about his former television wife, Patricia Heaton; followed by Grey’s Anatomy winner Katherine Heigl uttering a word (which the censors weren’t fast enough to stop audiences from seeing her mouth – although it could not be heard); and finally when Sally Field took the Lord’s name in vein during her anti-war acceptance speech as Best Actress in a Drama.

If there was any area in which the Emmys did get it right, it was in the final two awards, as Best Comedy went to NBC’s 30 Rock, while HBO’s The Sopranos was named Best Drama.

Oh, and Tony Shalhoub finally left an Emmys ceremony empty-handed. I guess we can be thankful for that!