The 2025 Emmy Awards kicked off with a sketch celebrating “the most powerful medium ever created.”
First-time host Nate Bargatze teamed up with “Saturday Night Live” solid members Bowen Yang, Mikey Day and James Austin Johnson for the opening of the 77th Emmy Awards in a skit that imagined how tv got here to be. Bargatze portrayed Philo T. Farnsworth, the “visionary genius” who noticed the potential of tv’s future.
As Farnsworth, Bargatze waxed poetic in regards to the medium that can “bring the world shows that inform and educate [and] shows that make us laugh and cry.” He went on to speak in regards to the varied channels he dreamed of that can exist for everybody’s pursuits, together with the Journey Channel, Meals Community and the Historical past Channel.
Probably the most risque joke of the sketch got here when Farnsworth talked about that there could be channels for folks of each tradition, together with “Telemundo for Spanish-speakers and BET — Black Entertainment Television.” When requested if there could be a community for white folks, he talked about Emmys airer CBS, which one in all Farnsworth’s assistants described as “the Caucasian Broadcast System.” (Yang’s query a couple of community for Asians went unanswered.)
Host Nate Bargatze, proper, and Bowen Yang seem in a gap sketch on the 77th Emmy Awards.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
Bargatze returned to the stage to elucidate his plan on the way to maintain the night’s occasion operating on time by an incentive involving a donation to the Boys & Women Membership.
For “every second [the winners] go over 45 seconds [in their acceptance speeches], we will deduct $1,000 away from the Boys & Girls Club [donation],” mentioned Bargatze. “If [the winners] go under, we will put $1,000 a second back on…. Don’t go crazy though, because I am paying for this.”
In an interview within the lead-up to the Emmys, Bargatze advised The Occasions that his primary hope for the present is that “everybody just has fun.”
When requested whether or not he felt any stress to include politics or every other hot-button challenge in his monologue, he admitted, “There were a couple jokes [written for me] that I’d be like, ‘I don’t know if I want to say it.’ ”
“But everybody knows that I wouldn’t,” mentioned Bargatze. “Because you can say stuff in a way that would have broad appeal on [certain controversial issues], but it’s a matter of, ‘Do I even want to bring it up?’ I’m sure people are gonna have speeches and want to say whatever they want to say and they go do it. But for me, I should be the constant palate cleanser. What I think or believe or any of that stuff just doesn’t matter for the purpose of what I’m doing. I’m there to be entertaining and move the show along. So I’ll just do me.”
The 2025 Emmy Awards present is being broadcast reside on CBS.