Neil Patrick Harris' hot streak as the 21st century awards-show answer to Johnny Carson hit a few speed bumps with this year's wildly hit-or-miss television honors. 
 
 Jeff Daniels beat out Bryan Cranston. Bobby Cannavale trumped Aaron Paul. Tony Hale mopped the floor with the Modern Family guys. And Stephen Colbert finally nudged out Jon Stewart for variety-show supremacy. So with so many unexpected wins, why was the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards telecast such a bloated bore? Chalk it up to tonal inconsistency? Misconceived production numbers? Too many protracted pretaped segments at the expense of spontaneity? An overload of solemnity? 
 
 Perhaps Don Cheadle inadvertently hit it on the head during a look back a half-century to the momentous events of 1963, when he acknowledged “television’s active role in allowing us to mourn collectively and begin to heal.” That’s a noble sentiment in the intended context of the John F. Kennedy assassination. But in such a moribund ceremony, any mention of mourning felt awkwardly appropriate. It didn’t take the Breaking Bad meth dancers -- yes, really -- to point up the uncomfortable paradox of television’s best being celebrated in a night of spectacularly messy TV. 
 
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 As the man in the firing line, Neil Patrick Harris will likely cop a lot of flak. But with so many blundering producing decisions intruding on his limited time at the podium, the host didn’t really stand a chance. 
 
 Harris has four lauded turns as Tony Awards emcee under his belt, plus a previous gig fronting the Emmys in 2009. He knows what he’s doing. His insouciant irreverence hit the mark in an intro segment in which he binge-watched the entire TV season. Ditto when his opening monologue was hijacked by previous hosts (Jimmy Kimmel, Jane Lynch, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien) and by front-row hecklers Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, demanding that he strip down and start twerking. Making that sabotage part of the master plan of Kevin Spacey, in character as House of Cards’ reptilian Frank Underwood, was a droll touch. And somehow Harris’ humor and charm failed to provide much glue. (Truth be told, he was also part of the producing team, which makes him far from blameless.) 
 
 The expected opening song-and-dance number failed to materialize until midshow. By the time it did, the mood had been so thoroughly flattened that Harris, 16 back-up dancers, Nathan Fillion and Sarah Silverman faced an uphill battle to milk much amusement out of the routine glitz of “The Number in the Middle of the Show.” Even worse was the choreography segment, with a faux-reality setup leading to thematic dance numbers for each of the drama nominees -- a throwback to the good old, bad old days when Debbie Allen choreographed the Oscars. 
 
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 When Harris’ How I Met Your Mother castmates turned up in a pretaped mock-infomercial for The Ryan Seacrest Center for Excessive Hosting Disorder, dragging in Arsenio Hall as part of their intervention, the irony was agonizing. 
 
 Too often, such labored filler segments merely ate up time, meaning the award recipients were played off almost as soon as they began speaking. Shorter acceptance speeches normally are a good thing, a memo that Nurse Jackie winner Merritt Wever appeared to have gotten with her succinct: “Thank you so much. I gotta go. Bye.” But a few more discursive comments might have helped stave off the weird pall that hung over much of the ceremony. 
 
 In one inspired bit early on, Hale returned to the stage soon after his supporting actor in a comedy win for Veep, sycophantically flanking his “boss,” Julia Louis-Dreyfus, when she was honored for the same show. Cutting to their co-star Anna Chlumsky madly texting in the audience only made the joke funnier. Michael Douglas also scored some laughs with his innuendo-laden acceptance speech for Behind the Candelabra, acknowledging that the movie was a “two-hander” and giving his co-star Matt Damon the choice of “the bottom or the top” for his half of the award. Gracious remarks by class acts such as James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn were like invigorating breaths of fresh air -- likewise the welcome appearances of Bob Newhart, who showed that less is more. 
 
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 But every moment of genuine levity had to contend with another deep plunge into self-important sobriety. Spreading the “In Memoriam” salutes throughout the show was a large part of that problem, laying such a thick carpet of gloom that it made much of Harris’ material seem smug. 
 
 During the runup to Sunday’s ceremony, news that Glee star Cory Monteith was to be given a special tribute prompted some discontent, suggesting that, by contrast, lumping such iconic faces as Jack Klugman and Larry Hagman into the collective obit was doing those TV veterans a disservice. But it was impossible not to be moved by the heartfelt sincerity of Jane Lynch’s salute to her late Glee co-star. 
 
 Other tributes included Michael J. Fox’s bow to Family Ties creator Gary David Goldberg; Robin Williams’ nod to fellow comedian Jonathan Winters, with whom he worked on Mork & Mindy; Edie Falco’s tearful farewell to her Sopranos husband James Gandolfini; and most affecting of all, Rob Reiner’s loving words for his All in the Family mother-in-law, Jean Stapleton. In a year of countless sad losses for television, the Emmys clearly set out to acknowledge the passing of key figures who touched different generations. The intention was honorable, even if some major names ended up seeming like also-rans. But the complete absence of clips from either the standalone tributes or the group acknowledgement robbed them of emotional resonance. 
 
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 The 1963 remembrance was too rushed to have much impact, playing like a promo for a more interesting PBS special. The first-ever African-American Emmy acting nominee, Diahann Carroll, appeared onstage with this year’s contender Kerry Washington to acknowledge how far television had come in terms of racial inclusiveness. But again, this gesture was more symbolic than meaningful. 
 
 In the evening’s most anticipated musical interlude, Elton John donned one of his old glittery Captain Fantastic jackets to pay tribute to Liberace. But the choice of a forgettable new song with only the most tenuous connection to the Behind the Candelabra subject made this another black hole in a ceremony littered with them. 
 
 The big drag at the Emmys has always been the deja vu factor of the same winners year after year. Claire Danes again? Jim Parsons again? And despite edgier contenders in Louie, Girls and Veep, another best comedy win for Modern Family was gruesomely inevitable. Given that USA is about to start syndicating season-one reruns of that sitcom -- the last time the show’s writing really excelled -- the ho-hum award felt somehow right. 
 
 This was an Emmy telecast so plodding, lifeless and just plain glum that even the overdue best drama win for Breaking Bad failed to provide a lift at the end of the show. ||||| "Modern Family" creator Steven Levitan summed up the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards telecast when he accepted another outstanding comedy award for the show."This may be the saddest Emmys of all time, but we could not be happier," he said.The CBS telecast, hosted with gusto by Neil Patrick Harris, was smothered by five "in memoriam" tributes to individuals as well as a montage late in the telecast. It was, in a word, a bummer.Harris tried to bring up the energy with jokes and a mid-broadcast song-and-dance number called "The Number in the Middle of the Show." But nothing seemed to help. Every time the show got moving, a tribute cast a pall over the proceedings.Most of the presenter banter was strained and only a few acceptance speeches drew laughs. Here are the night's best moments, which were few. (Click through the gallery at top of page for images from the telecast.)Accepting the variety series Emmy for "The Colbert Report," Colbert cracked, "It's a cliche to say it's an honor just to be nominated. It's more than that; it's also a lie. This is way better." When he accepted the writing award, he said, "Wow, the Emmys are so good this year." If only that were true.In a pre-taped howler, the cast of "How I Met Your Mother" do a commercial for the Ryan Seacrest Center for Excessive Hosting, where they send Neil Patrick Harris because he is suffering from Excessive Hosting Disorder.When Julia Louis-Dreyfus accepted her award for "Veep." fellow winner and costar Tony Hale followed her to the stage, standing behind her just like his "Veep" character does in the show. He whispered names and comments into her ear so she could complete her speech.Merritt Wever, a surprise supporting actress winner for "Nurse Jackie," was rendered pretty much speechless, thus delivering the night's most honest and brief acceptance. "Thank you so much," she said. "I gotta go. Bye."Amy Poehler and Tina Fey show why they are the funniest ladies of the moment, again. During Harris' opening skit in which past hosts offered him advice, the women cat call him from the audience with comments like,"Take your pants off! And twerk it!" When he said that would be degrading, Poehler responded, "It might be degrading, but we would be de-grateful."Diahann Carroll, who was the first African-American to win in Emmy way back when, showed she's still a pro. "It's been such a long time since I've been standing in this place, I don't know what to do," Carroll said. "But the men are much more beautiful than when I was doing television. I don't know where you came from, but I'm very happy to see you." ||||| First, our apologies: we may have hyped this year’s Emmy Awards as a lighter Sunday-night-programming alternative to Breaking Bad. Aside from the trophies, and the odd sexual-innuendo-tinged acceptance speech from Michael Douglas, however, the vibe inside the Nokia Theater’s Emmydome was not that upbeat. (To quote Patton Oswalt: “That was one soul-crushing slab of televised darkness. Over on cable, however, @BreakingBad_AMC was amazing.”) How could it be, with the steady stream of in-memoriam segments that stopped just long enough for a series of less relevant downers including, but not limited to, a Beatles cover performed by Carrie Underwood, a U.S.-history lesson from Don Cheadle, and a tribute to Liberace by Elton John? It was all so torturous that when Bob Newhart interrupted the downcast proceeding, we don’t even remember what for, Al Pacino—looking as though he had just roused himself from a two-hour slumber—led the audience in a standing ovation, as if to say, “Yay for the living!” 
 
 
 
 But somewhere in all of that Emmy muckety-muck, there were some genuinely brilliant surprises. The first being Merritt Wever’s very deserved, but very unexpected, win in the supporting-actress-in-a-comedy category for her work on Nurse Jackie. Up against Modern Family favorites Sofía Vergara and Julie Bowen, the young actress was so shocked by the win that all she could mutter at the podium was, “Thanks so much. I gotta go, bye.” A close second in the awesome-acceptance-speech department came from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who collected her comedic-actress Emmy with Veep co-star (and supporting comedic-actor winner) Tony Hale in tow. Assuming the role of Gary, Louis-Dreyfus’s aide on the HBO series, Hale stood behind her while she accepted her Emmy to hold her bag (a recurring Veep joke) and remind her to thank her family. 
 
 Joining Wever with their own surprise wins were Jeff Daniels in the dramatic-actor category (where he was up against such heavy-hitting nominees as Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, and Homeland’s Damian Lewis) and Boardwalk Empire’s Bobby Cannavale in the dramatic-supporting-actor race (which featured Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, Homeland’s Mandy Patinkin, and Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage). Like last year, Modern Family won the best-comedy-series title, and Claire Danes took the best-dramatic-actress award for Homeland. In groundbreaking developments, Netflix secured its first Emmy, for direction of a drama series, which went to David Fincher for House of Cards. Michael Douglas predictably took the best-actor-in-a-miniseries-or-movie trophy for his portrayal of Liberace in HBO’s Behind the Candelabra. Explaining that he wanted to split his award with co-star Matt Damon, who played Liberace’s real-life lover Scott Thorson, Douglas joked, “Matt, you really deserve half of this. So do you want the bottom or the top?” 
 
 
 
 Breaking Bad won two awards—supporting actress in a drama series for Anna Gunn and the top drama title at the end of the night. Sadly for Game of Thrones fans, this meant that neither Emilia Clarke nor the fantasy show won in their nominated categories. Similarly defeated was Mad Men, which unfathomably failed to clinch a single award tonight. While on the subject of injustices, it seems unfair to tease Emmy viewers with several minutes’ worth of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler—who appeared early in the telecast to heckle host Neil Patrick Harris—only to leave us with three relentlessly depressing hours of programming. 
 
 
 
 Meanwhile, it bears noting that Neil Patrick Harris—a consummate pro—expertly M.C.’d the proceedings, brightening them up wherever he could. Unfortunately for him, Emmy producers had a somewhat dour agenda for the evening, which left this viewer, at least, feeling like one of the night’s biggest losers. ||||| We don’t ask much of the Primetime Emmy Awards. Nobody ever gets one of these three-hour statuette dispensaries completely right, but the Emmys always seem as though they’d be the easiest of all the awards shows to pull off — mostly because the likelihood of culturally disruptive twerking is very, very low, which means the Emmys are the awards show no one ever remembers 18 hours later. 
 
 So what happened Sunday night during CBS’s anemic and often awkward Emmys telecast, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris? (Or let me put it another way: I had to next-day “Breaking Bad” for this?) 
 
 Everyone’s favorite messed-up meth saga did at last win the best drama award, so the night wasn’t a total wash, but all those highfalutin theses about the Netflix-y future of television failed to materialize. Claire Danes won lead actress (drama) for Showtime’s “Homeland” for the second year in a row, and, inexplicably, Jeff Daniels won lead actor (drama) for HBO’s “The Newsroom.” 
 
 “Modern Family” won best comedy series for what seems like the squillionth time, but it is really just the fourth. HBO’s Washington-based comedy “Veep” took two acting awards — Tony Hale for supporting actor, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus for lead actress the second straight year. And Anna Gunn won for supporting actress (drama) for AMC’s “Breaking Bad.” 
 
 That’s most of the news, now for the snooze, starting with a dreary opening sketch that featured Harris locking himself in a multi-screen chamber to binge the entire 2012-13 season of every television show in a matter of minutes. 
 
 1 of 57 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Emmys red carpet fashion: View Photos Buttoned-up gowns felt fresh compared with the amount of skin seen on carpets of late. — Cara Kelly Caption A hint of modesty infused the red carpet at the 65th annual Emmy Awards on Sunday night. Call it a backlash to summer headlines of nude pop stars and a sensational buff-colored bikini at MTV’s Video Music Awards. Buttoned-up gowns felt fresh compared with the amount of skin seen on carpets of late. — Cara Kelly The visual interest was provided by unique necklines. Zooey Deschanel’s sea-foam J. Mendel delicately traced the line of her collarbones before breaking into a small slit diffusing the solid block of color. Jason Merritt/Getty Images Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 Once onstage, Harris was joined by former Emmys hosts (Jimmy Kimmel, Jane Lynch, Jimmy Fallon and Conan O’Brien), who needled him in one of those tiresome meta-routines in which all the comedy is directed at the existence of the show itself, in real time. The joke just got staler when an unamused Kevin Spacey, the star of Netflix’s hit “House of Cards,” turned and addressed the camera as House Majority Whip Francis Underwood, his fictional character from the show. 
 
 Later, Harris’s “How I Met Your Mother” co-stars confronted him in an intervention for “EHD” (excessive hosting disorder), treatable only at the “Ryan Seacrest Center for Excessive Hosting.” 
 
 Halfway through the evening, Harris finally brought out the jaunty song-and-dance routines, the main symptom of his EHD, with a number called “The Number in the Middle of the Show.” (Sample lyric: “The Emmy Awards are three hours long / Now there’s three minutes less to go.”) One can’t imagine a flashier way to demonstrate that Hollywood’s awards-show writers desperately need to think of a way to tell jokes that aren’t about telling jokes; to stage a show that’s not only about the show. 
 
 The best line of the evening came very early on from Merritt Wever, who seemed so shocked at winning the supporting actress Emmy for a comedy show (“Nurse Jackie”) that she went with her flusteredness and said: “I gotta go, bye.” 
 
 The rest of us (well, some of us) gotta stay, alas, in a listless position on the couch while the Emmys poked along as flatly as possible. The banter had no flair for comedy. The tributes — including short monologues from Robin Williams, Rob Reiner, Michael J. Fox and Jane Lynch (honoring the recent deaths of comic actor Jonathan Winters, “All in the Family’s” Jean Stapleton, producer Gary David Goldberg and “Glee’s” Cory Monteith) sometimes seemed stiff and, most curiously, clip-less. 
 
 Lynch said that Monteith was “a beautiful soul. He was not perfect, which many of us here can relate to. . . . Tonight we remember Cory for all he was and mourn the loss of what he could have been.” That was supposed to be one of the evening’s most moving moments, and it only sort of was. Edie Falco also encountered a similar struggle in a tribute to “The Sopranos” star James Gandolfini, trying to make what was on the teleprompter sound as authentic as the pain she so clearly feels at losing a friend. 
 
 More strangeness: Elton John performed a song that he said was a tribute to Liberace, which is topical because of all the nominations for HBO’s “Behind the Candelabra,” a film didn’t exactly leave everyone who saw it with a warm feeling about the flamboyant pianist. (“Behind the Candelabra” went on to win three big awards, for best miniseries/movie, best director for Steven Soderbergh and best actor for its star Michael Douglas, who tried to perk up his acceptance speech with jokes about gay sex.) And somewhere in this now-blurry Emmys night, Carrie Underwood performed the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” as a tribute to all the things that happened during or close to the year 1963 (the March on Washington; the John F. Kennedy assassination), because . . .? Because the world is round, it blows my mind. 
 
 1 of 10 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Claire Danes’s ‘faux bob.’ Jeff Daniels’s win and other Emmy moments View Photos Surprising winners Merritt Wever and Jeff Daniels, a faux bob, an extra-large beard, Will Ferrell’s kids and more top moments from the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards. — Veronica Toney Caption Surprising winners Merritt Wever and Jeff Daniels, a faux bob, an extra-large beard, Will Ferrell’s kids and more top moments from the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards. — Veronica Toney Claire Danes’s faux-bob Real or faux? That was the question surrounding Claire Danes ’s hair. No need to worry, “Homeland” fans; Danes’s bob was a fake. Danes and her “bob” went on to win the prize for outstanding actress in a drama series at the 65th annual Primetime Emmy Awards. Mario Anzuoni/Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 “The Emmys are so good this year,” Stephen Colbert deadpanned as he and his “Colbert Report” crew accepted the award for variety series writing. (The show also won best variety series. Another victory for the “finally” list.) “Modern Family” creator Steven Levitan also took a dig at the show while accepting the best comedy series award at the evening’s end: “This may be the saddest Emmys of all time, but we could not be happier,” he said. 
 
 So, to sum up: An awards show filled with skits about how bad awards shows are gave awards to people who talked about how bad the show turned out, while everyone on Twitter had decided that hours earlier. These days, that’s entertainment. 
 
 See all of the winners and highlights from the 2013 Emmy Awards
– The reviews are in for last night's Emmy Awards, and they are not good. (Catch up on what happened here.) One big problem: The In Memoriam segments that seemed to arrive every 20 minutes or so. A sampling of the reactions: The "steady stream of in-memoriam segments ... stopped just long enough for a series of less relevant downers including, but not limited to, a Beatles cover performed by Carrie Underwood, a US-history lesson from Don Cheadle, and a tribute to Liberace by Elton John," writes Julie Miller in Vanity Fair, calling the proceedings "torturous" and "relentlessly depressing." The CBS telecast "was, in a word, a bummer," writes Curt Wagner in the Chicago Tribune. Host Neil Patrick Harris "tried to bring up the energy ... but nothing seemed to help. Every time the show got moving, a tribute cast a pall over the proceedings." The opening sketch was "dreary," the first onstage piece "tiresome," and the whole thing "anemic and often awkward," writes Hank Stuever in the Washington Post. All the jokes seemed to be about the show itself, and then there were the bits that were included because ... why? No one seems to know (think the aforementioned Carrie Underwood performance). "So, to sum up: An awards show filled with skits about how bad awards shows are gave awards to people who talked about how bad the show turned out, while everyone on Twitter had decided that hours earlier." There were lots of unexpected wins, but even so, the whole thing was "a bloated bore," writes David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter. The "overload of solemnity" and "self-important sobriety" was part of the problem, but the "labored filler segments" were also pretty bad—especially considering they were the reason the "award recipients were played off virtually as soon as they began speaking." Even a long-overdue best drama win for Breaking Bad couldn't save this "plodding, lifeless, and just plain glum" show. Everyone agrees, however, Merritt Wever's acceptance speech was a total highlight.