Neil Patrick Harris, host of this year's Emmy ceremony, wears a tuxedo and holds up an Emmy statuette.

Neil Patrick Harris is hosting this year's Emmys, which might be surprisingly interesting. (Cliff Lipson / CBS)

by Linda Holmes

Now that Tina Fey already has an Emmy and Mad Men has already lost a couple of them, it may seem like the suspense of the Emmys is over -- but it's not. On Sunday night, in fact, it could be a far happier occasion than it's been at times.

Emmy night has an annoying tendency to get into ruts in which it does the same dances over and over: it does the West Wing Shuffle, the Boston Legal Mambo, the Frasier Cha-Cha, and Jeremy Piven's Cool Dude Club Moves. And it does them over and over, year after year, until you think, "I want to see something else."

Some of that will undoubtedly continue this year. Some winners will be of the "Ugh, that guy, again" variety, but it looks like most of them won't. Piven didn't get his usual nomination. Neither did James Spader for the last season of Boston Legal.

In fact, in the major categories, there are very few nominations that hang over the ceremony with the Emmys' characteristic note of dull inevitability. Short of Entourage winning Outstanding Comedy -- and I've never been able to tolerate that show long enough to develop a strong critical opinion of it, just a gut reaction that it's unspeakably obnoxious -- there's very little in the big categories that would make me wildly frustrated if it happened. The closest would be Kevin Dillon or Jon Cryer beating out Neil Patrick Harris, Rainn Wilson, Tracy Morgan, and Jack McBrayer for Outstanding Supporting Actor In A Comedy, and even those guys aren't repeat-winning award hogs.

It might be one of the better sets of winners, actually, providing that you put aside the heartbreak of who was nominated in the first place. The big snubs already happened -- Battlestar Galactica isn't going to win anything on Sunday, but you can prepare for that now and get your crippling grief and/or frothing-mouthed anger out of the way.

And if you do, you will be rewarded with several hours of Neil Patrick Harris, who was an underused but perfectly fine host at the Tony Awards earlier this year, and who is not only hosting the ceremony but might even finally win this year for his role on How I Met Your Mother.

If you'll be watching -- or perhaps even if you won't -- please join us here, where we'll be live-blogging the ceremony, beginning at 7:30 p.m. I'll be joined by Monkey See contributors Marc Hirsh and Joe Reid, both of whom, I will tell you, have some strong feelings about television. It should be a good time, and it's less likely than usual to be an intensely frustrating experience, and what more, really, can you ask from an awards show?

categories: Awards Season, Television

9:00 - September 16, 2009

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