Painful Parody

I was so annoyed by the poor nominations that I didn't plan to write about this year's Emmys. But now there's controversy.

The show opened with a filmed bit where host Conan O'Brien is in a plane crash. Some felt it was insensitive, since 49 had died in a crash earlier that day in Lexington, Kentucky. The head of NBC's Lexington affiliate, Tim Gilbert, was horrified, but since the show was live it aired before he could do anything about it.

He wants an apology. "They could have killed the opening and it wouldn't have hurt the show at all. We wish somebody had thought this through. It's somewhere between ignorance and incompetence."

He'll get his apology, no doubt, but I'm inclined to cut NBC and Conan some slack. It takes months to plan such a show and making changes at the last second are extremely difficult. (This is assuming the people running the show even heard the news.)

I'm not saying they shouldn't have cut or somehow changed the bit. It's too bad they didn't. I'm just saying it's a mistake, but not a horrible one. And Tim Gilbert is wrong. The plane crash was the beginning of a lengthy piece that had Conan running in and out of popular TV shows. Conan then washes up on a Lost's island, and is soon traveling through The Office, 24, House and South Park. It was well done, and no doubt quite troublesome and expensive to create. Without it, the show would have had a ten-minute chunk of nothing. Gilbert may run shows on his station, but he doesn't understand how they work. (Or to be fair, was probably too emotionally involved to understand what he was saying.)