Bargatze pays to keep things moving

The low-key host uses a high-stakes strategy to stay on time. As a gambit and joke, it sort of works.

- ROBERT LLOYD TELEVISION CRITIC

BOWEN YANG, left, and Nate Bargatze (as Philo T. Farnsworth) open the show with a sketch.

THERE WERE two questions the 77th Emmy Awards, held Sunday night at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, had to answer, other than who would win what. (It's an honor just to be nominated.)

One was how the show, a glittery evening devoted to the most popular of popular arts, would play against a world gone mad. The other, not distinct from the first, was how first-time host Nate Bargatze would do.

The ceremony is hosted by a round robin of the major networks, and this year the honor fell to CBS, whose corporate overlord, Paramount, has come to represent capitulation to the Trump administration, settling a baseless lawsuit in what is widely viewed as a payoff to grease the wheels of its merger with Skydance and promising to eliminate its DEI protocols. Executive interference in the news department amid an apparent rightward turn has led to the resignations of “60 Minutes” producer Bill Owens and CBS News President and CEO Wendy McMahon. And there’s the cancellation of Stephen Colbert's “Late Show,” the timing of which some have found suspicious.

But if your goal was to avoid insulted celebrities, social media outrage or petulant notes from the White House, you could have done no better than to hire Bargatze, a clean, calm, classical, noncontroversial, nonpolitical, very funny, very successful comedian. Bargatze, who has been in comedy since 2002, saw his career explode over the last few years; his appeal is not so much mainstream, which is to say soft-edged, as it is broad - something for everybody.