Monday night the Television Academy ran its In Memoriam segment at the Emmys and left out Robert Redford. Not a background player from a show that got canceled after six episodes. Robert Redford. The Sundance Kid. An Oscar-winning director who spent six decades in front of and behind a camera. If there’s a more famous name to accidentally forget, I’d like to hear it.
He had company. Chuck Norris didn’t make the cut either. Neither did Nicholas Brendon, who spent seven seasons as Xander on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Patrick Muldoon from Melrose Place, or Daveigh Chase, who voiced Lilo in Lilo and Stitch and played the girl in the well in The Ring. Then there’s James Ransone, of The Wire and Generation Kill, who’d already been left out of the Oscars’ In Memoriam earlier this year and then got skipped by the Emmys too. Same category, same year, twice. His widow, Jamie “Skipper” McPhee, posted afterward that her husband “was not acknowledged in memoriam at tonight’s Emmys,” and called it “simply not right.” Hard to argue with a woman doing that math the same night it happened.
Some of this has an actual explanation. Peter Cullen, who voiced Optimus Prime for forty years, died one day after this year’s eligibility cutoff, so he’s next year’s tribute, not a snub, just a calendar. Fine. That’s not what happened with Redford. He died in September of last year, months before anyone sat down to build a rundown, comfortably inside the window the whole time.
When people pushed back on the list, the Television Academy didn’t say “we made some calls we’d take back.” It said this: “Given only a few minutes to honor those who have passed, there is a limit on how many people can be acknowledged on the broadcasts.” A few minutes. The segment ran ten minutes and thirty seconds. That’s not a few minutes. That’s most of a sitcom, and somehow there still wasn’t room for an Oscar-winning director.
This isn’t really an Emmys problem. It’s the move every institution makes the moment it gets caught skimping on something it swore it would handle with care: shrink the constraint until it sounds reasonable, and bet nobody checks the clock. Governments do it with budgets. Companies do it with hold times. Now award shows are doing it with the dead, which might be a new low even by that bar.
Nobody’s entitled to airtime, and producing one of these things live is a genuinely hard, fast job. But if you’re going to tell a room, and a widow watching from home, that there simply wasn’t time, don’t leave the actual runtime sitting right there for anyone holding a stopwatch.
My two cents: if you’ve got ten and a half minutes to spend, spend them telling the truth instead of the excuse.