What Goes on Behind Emmy’s Doors

Television stars will stand proudly in front of a podium at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium next month, thanking “the academy” as they claim their prizes at the 51st annual nighttime Emmy Awards.

Yet like most of Hollywood’s regular back-patting exercises, the reality is somewhat more complex than that, involving arcane rituals and procedures that limit who actually chooses the Emmy winners in most instances to a few dozen hardy souls.

While the 9,500-member Academy of Television Arts & Sciences organizes and presents the Emmys, who ultimately wins gets decided this weekend by a surprisingly small subset of that group. Roughly 1,000 people are expected to show up at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to form the “judging panels” that will choose award recipients in 77 categories, and less than 20% of them will vote for the top two awards: best comedy and drama series.

All told, a little more than 100 people usually pick the winner for best comedy, with slightly fewer members weighing in on the drama side. Much smaller groups determine who receives Emmys in individual categories and more obscure technical areas.

“The size of the panels can be really small,” noted one academy member. “Sometimes it’s just eight or nine people.”

This makes sense in certain disciplines, which can only be voted upon by people who work in that specific area. You don’t want some schmo off the street trying to gauge who deserves the Emmy for art direction, makeup or technical direction/camera/video, whatever that is. The same peer-judging rules apply to writing, directing and acting, despite the fact everyone thinks they know a good performance or script when they see one.

John Leverence, the academy’s awards director, conceded the panels are relatively small, but he maintains they are sufficient to fairly rate each program. “It only takes 12 to hang a person,” he noted of trial juries.

If the system is far from perfect, it’s because the TV academy wants to ensure that voters actually watch the nominees, which explains the use of judging panels instead of opening the final vote to the entire membership. By contrast, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lets all its members help name the year’s best picture, with no way to definitively ascertain whether those who vote have seen all the contending films.

For all its quirks, in fact, the Emmy process boasts several advantages over other entertainment awards, from the Oscars (“Eeny, meeny . . . oh hell, Spielberg”) to the People’s Choice Awards (what someone tells a Gallup pollster and really views are often quite different) to the new TV Guide Awards, which, like all-star balloting in pro sports, allows die-hard fans to skew the results by voting early and often.

Still, in terms of sheer absurdity, nothing can match the Golden Globe Awards. Presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.--a group whose credentialing requirement entails getting an article published, pretty much anywhere, before Y2K--it’s a ceremony Hollywood has lavishly embraced. This is primarily because the group’s 80-some-odd members speak a language the industry understands--one that says, in essence, “Whoever hosts the most impressive press junket wins.”

Compared to that, the most vexing aspect of the Emmys, aside from low voter turnout, may be the notion of assembling groups to watch TV together. After all, if you want a true sense of how folks respond to a show, let them watch the way they normally do: at home, in their underwear, while simultaneously paying bills and trying to keep the dog off that new throw rug.

The TV academy has kept tinkering with how the Emmys are chosen. Thanks to a welcome rules change initiated a few years ago, for example, eight episodes of each best drama and comedy series nominee now circulate among the different panels (no one group sees more than two), meaning roughly a third of last season’s episodes are considered. Under the old format, a series that turned out two terrific episodes amid an otherwise so-so year could shine come judgment day.

“The idea was in order to [evaluate] a series, you should have more than one or two episodes representing that series,” Leverence said.

Of course, the bottom line remains that the Emmy decision comes down to small groups sequestered in a room all day. A best drama voter will sit for nearly eight hours viewing episodes of each nominee, excluding lunch and bathroom breaks.

While ample attention this year will center on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” the first cable series nominated as best drama, it’s worth remembering that few shows win their first time out. Fellow nominees “ER,” “NYPD Blue” and “The Practice” all received the Emmy in their sophomore year, while “Law & Order” waited until its seventh season.

In seeking to understand how the voting works, it’s more interesting to look at best comedy, since this year’s field is especially diverse, beginning with “Frasier,” the winner of an unprecedented five consecutive Emmys.

The challengers: “Friends,” a hugely popular show snubbed by voters in recent years, coming off perhaps its funniest season; “Everybody Loves Raymond,” a hilarious family sitcom (an especially ignored subgenre) gaining overdue recognition in its third year; “Ally McBeal,” a one-hour mix of comedy and drama, shot on film without a laugh track; and “Sex and the City,” an HBO comedy that peppers insight about relationships with nudity and language seemingly plucked from George Carlin’s “words you can’t say on TV” routine.

After screening the shows, voters will use a “preferential” system, listing their favorites in order from 1 (tops) to 5 (last). Like golf, another sport popular among the idle rich, the low score wins.

Despite its flaws, the Emmys may be to awards what democracy, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, was to alternate forms of government--in short, the worst system ever invented, except for all the others.

As for keeping the results shrouded in secrecy, one TV academy member who has served as a judge in the past said, “Ninety-nine percent of the time, I walk out of the room knowing what’s going to win.”

Granted, only a fraction of the membership will participate this weekend and be able to make such an educated guess on Emmy night; however, it’s a sure bet the attendees will look great, and when it comes to award shows, that pretty much counts for everything.

Brian Lowry’s column appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached by e-mail at brian.lowry@latimes.com.