Condensed cinema stands alone

AMONG the many Emmy Awards that will not be given out tonight -- because they were given out earlier, along with the myriad “creative arts” awards, in such categories as directing, music, casting and best animated, documentary and children’s programs -- is the Emmy for outstanding commercial. Quite possibly you did not know there was such a thing, and perhaps now that you do, you question whether there should be, commercials being in some sense the natural enemy of television programs, as a mongoose is to a cobra.

And yet the best commercials are at least the equal of the best TV shows. Pound for pound, they are undeniably the most fully conceived, finely tuned, ambitiously mounted, exquisitely executed things on the air -- a direct result, of course, of their lasting only 30 to 120 seconds and costing as much as or more than whole episodes of what they are designed to interrupt. At the same time, the money advertisers pay to broadcast commercials is what allows commercial television to spend money on itself, to put on as slick a show as it does, to afford Charlie Sheen.

This will all change eventually, but for now we remain in the age of the TV commercial, when an advertisement can be news as much as the thing it interrupts. (Think of the Super Bowl.) And the old medium is already merging with the new media: The most arresting, funny or spectacular advertisements now go round and round the Internet like horses on a carousel (at no extra cost to the advertiser). Brief enough to easily download and well within the limits of the contracting modern attention span -- a model of economy, is a TV commercial -- they are made to order for the viral world.

The Emmy nominees -- which is to say, the four biggest vote getters of the 101 entries on the ballot -- were “Concert” for Ameriquest, “Clydesdale American Dream” for Budweiser, “Stick” for FedEx, and “Required Reading” for Hallmark. (The award goes to the ad agency and production company, not to the client.) “Concert” is one of a series of clever, slightly dark spots in which, to illustrate the tag line “Don’t judge too quickly,” various characters are caught in what look like compromising positions; in the nominated spot, a man appears to a pair of policemen to be soliciting his own teenage daughter for prostitution as she leans in at the window of his car. “Stick” is set in an expensively realized prehistoric world in which a caveman unsuccessfully attempts to mail a stick by carrier-pterodactyl, only to be upbraided by his caveman boss for not using FedEx. (“Not my problem,” the boss says when the caveman protests that the company hasn’t been created yet.) In the long and measured “Required Reading,” a grown man learns to read in order to finally read old birthday cards. And in the Budweiser ad, a young Clydesdale’s greatest wish is to slip into a yoke and pull a wagonload of beer.

I have seen the other 97 entries as well: The reel that the academy sent ran an hour and 13 minutes -- without commercial interruption, as it were -- and I must say it was more consistently entertaining than many other hours of television I have watched. It was, indeed, frequently exhilarating, a kind of roller coaster of imposed emotions. (I laughed, I cried.) I watched it twice, in fact, and the good ads were just as good the second time, as they would need to be -- a commercial you could watch only once would be a failure, unless of course it was powerful enough to guarantee lifetime brand loyalty with a single viewing. Interestingly, just as a TV show is more watchable with the commercials removed, commercials play better without the shows: They become the main event.

Some generalizations: Animals (either real, computer-animated, or some combination thereof) “acting human” are popular. The dehumanized office space (against which may be played strange, surprising, surreal events, as when the prehensile beard of a job applicant strokes the face of his interviewer, when not stealing her Skittles) seems a favorite setting. Bold, sans-serif type is still cool, in an 18-to-34 demographic way, and the not entirely ironic use of corny old pop songs that the 18-to-34 demographic is too young to actually remember remains fashionable. And there is an awful lot of basketball, even in ads for products that have nothing directly to do with basketball. Indeed, in many of the most creative commercials, you have no idea what you’re being pitched until the very end, and sometimes not even then, unless you already know the logo. (The softer the sell, the more intriguing the product.)

The winners? It was a tie: “Stick” and “Required Reading.” I would have chosen only “Concert.” “Stick” is too gratuitously violent for my taste -- unlike, say, the Spike Jonze Gap ad (a YouTube favorite), in which customers and employees destroy an outlet store, with steadily building mayhem, and which I found, um, nongratuitously violent, as well as funny and poetic. The Hallmark and the Budweiser ads were a tad too sentimental -- although brilliantly executed, I admit. (I had the intended emotional response, despite myself.) And the little Clydesdale sure was cute.

And of course, the subtext of every commercial is that a better world awaits you, even when the worse one is the one they show you. Which is news we all want to hear.

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Lloyd is a Times TV critic.