The Twelve Best Things About Last Night’s Emmy Awards!

Neil Patrick Harris probably doesn’t deserve all the credit for making last night’s Emmy Awards so incredibly watchable – but he deserves a hell of a lot of it.

What were the best parts? Here’s how I call it:

(12) Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s opening number, “Put Down the Remote.” I confess, I was mostly disappointed by this song (their closing Neil Patrick Harris number at the Tonys, written on the fly with lots of different version to be determined by the eventual winners, was stronger, and included the hilarious line, “This show could not be any gayer if Liza was named mayor, and Elton John took flight”).

Neil Patrick Harris

Still, Harris totally sold the song, as usual. And you gotta love these lyrics:

Straight from Mad Men there’s Joan

Ah, the curves she has shown

It would make a blind man say “damn,”

She could turn a gay straight -

Oh wait, never mind, there’s Jon Hamm!

(11) Toni Collette’s deceptively hot husband. No, seriously. He’s adorable.

Toni Collette and husband Dave Galafassi

(10) Amy Poehler’s “eyewear” joke for the Supporting Actress nominees. The glasses part of the joke pretty much bombed (because the women mostly seemed like unwilling participants), but Vanessa Williams facial reaction at the end, where she mimed, “Oh, no, I don’t think so!” was priceless. Lousy set-up to a fantastic pay-off.

(9) The divided-up stage. They had “stations” on the stage, with the band in one area, and the “producer’s booth” in another area? It never works when awards shows do gimmicks like this! And yet somehow it worked last night. But it’s probably just because all eyes were on Neil.