Steps and stumbles

STEPHEN McPHERSON must have been beside himself with the giggles Sunday night: The ABC Entertainment chief was trying to win the night with the blockbuster network premiere of the first “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and over at NBC they were airing an old-timey variety show called “The 58th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards.”

It seemed less an awards show than a return to the days when song and dance and comedy intermingled in a loose and somewhat joyous spectacle of -- perish the thought -- entertainment.

That theme was cheerfully captured by host Conan O’Brien’s overlong but winning show-topper, which was goofy but not arch or precious.

Other than, say, presidential conventions, variety is the last thing the broadcast networks want to program -- given that the last one to work was “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” (“American Idol” doesn’t count; it involves amateurs, and it has yet to work in Rip Taylor).

Variety, with its retro tag, is the province of the old, which the TV business classifies as anyone 50 years of age and up. The TV business hates people 50 years of age and up. In this way, the Emmy telecast Sunday night was at once a horrible showcase for the series that make TV a hot medium -- “Lost,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “The Sopranos,” “American Idol” -- and a wonderful, if somewhat accidental, tribute to the TV that defined the boomer generation.

The coup de grace -- or coup de something -- was the reunion of the original “Charlie’s Angels,” part of a tribute to Aaron Spelling, who died June 23.

Spelling, depending on your point of view, peddled either bad nighttime soap or great guilty pleasure TV. Having spent quality years of my youth waiting for Cheryl Ladd to jump out of the ocean or Barbie Benton to walk onto the Lido Deck of “The Love Boat,” I fall in the latter category.

The sight of Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith onstage, together again, was either exhilarating or disturbing; I’m still trying to decide which.

Even the traditional “in memoriam” segment seemed accented by the icons of ‘60s and ‘70s TV -- Don Adams of “Get Smart,” daytime talk show host Mike Douglas, “Andy Griffith’s” Don Knotts, “The Munsters’ ” Al Lewis, and Curt Gowdy, the voice of pro baseball and football, pre-ESPN and ESPN 2 and ESPN News, not to mention ESPN Classic, ESPN-HD and ESPN-En Espanol.

The only thing the Emmy Awards seem incapable of paying tribute to these days are the best shows on TV these days. An idiotic nomination process, based in part on the fact that voters can’t be actually asked to watch this stuff, inspires no confidence in the system by which winners are selected.

It’s not so much that “Lost” deserved to be nominated, it’s that none of the series are being judged in their totality.

So you sit there and watch Megan Mullally win for “Will & Grace,” a show living in syndication, and Blythe Danner for “Huff,” a canceled Showtime series watched by less than the population of Palm Springs, and Tony Shalhoub for “Monk.” Already, you could sense the demo leaving the room -- and that was before Barry Manilow won the award for outstanding individual performance in a variety or music program.

He beat out O’Brien, David Letterman and Jon Stewart. Also Stephen Colbert.

“I lost to Barry Manilow!” exclaimed Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.” Manilow had thanked “the people who run the Vegas Hilton,” as if the mob were still controlling that town. Cloris Leachman, presenting an Emmy for comedy series directing, brilliantly pronounced the HBO series “Entourage” as if it were actually some French weepie starring Catherine Deneuve.

And Bob Newhart, a master of the kind of deadpan embodied today in actors such as “The Office’s” Steve Carell, was kept backstage in an airtight chamber with an oxygen supply of no more than three hours, in a running gag with host O’Brien.

O’Brien’s opening was cute, and funny, as if performed by a much taller and more Irish Billy Crystal.

By the show’s end, I had lost total faith in the idea of an Emmy, but I could smell comeback for variety.