Worst. Emmys. Ever.

Ever, ever, ever. Ever.

Holy mother of god, did that suck. Heckuva job, Fox!! After that nightmare, Fox should be banned from broadcasting any awards shows. They've lost their hosting privileges. And whoever produced that, that thing needs to be spanked.

First of all, in the round! What *bleeping* genius came up with the idea of staging an awards show in the round? Bloody hell. Plus the set was hideous. It looked like it cost five cents. It was the Crackerjack box version of a set. (Hey, did anybody else think that James Spader got played off faster than normal after making the crack about how his seats were the worst seats he'd ever had? It sure seemed to me like the music came up mighty fast after that.)

And then there was Seacrest, our blessedly disappearing host. The indescribable agony of his opening monologue, which consisted of pointing out that there were TV stars in the audience. Yes, it was just that amazing. Nominated actors actually show up at the Emmys! Who knew? I, for one, was agog. Not.

I was at an Emmy watching party. As Seacrest endlessly yammered on, (Look! The cast of Gray's Anatomy is sitting over here!), I turned to one of my friends, and said, "Oh, my god, they've got nothing. Absolutely nothing." Sadly, it was true for the entire night.

Even an alleged comedy montage of one liners from late night hosts didn't work. It was horribly cut: most of the lines chosen weren't funny and the few that were funny were cut away from too fast, so the next cut stepped on the laugh. Then, it devolved into a serious montage of eulogies for Tom Snyder. A eulogy, now there's a laugh riot.

The Tom Snyder stuff in the comedy montage was completely inexplicable. Yes, he was a great late night host. However, they paid tribute to his memory in the in memoriam segment. Why they felt the need to kill the few laughs they had generated by bringing in the sadness of his loss in a comedy segment, that's just a mystery to me. It is, however, completely symptomatic of just how incompetent the show was on every level.

The best, or rather, nearly only entertainment in the show was the appearance by the cast of the musical Jersey Boys, which has a company on tour in L.A. at the moment. They sang a few of Frankie Valli and the Four Season's greatest hits. Now, you'll notice that Jersey Boys is a stage show, and that Valli and the Four Season's were a sixties pop act, who never had a tv show. So what was Jersey Boys doing on the Emmys, instead of the Tonys?

It's like this: unbelievably, it was a tribute to the Sopranos. Yes, even though the Four Seasons' music has absolutely nothing to do with the Sopranos. The Sopranos was set in New Jersey. The musical is called Jersey Boys. Voila! We've killed another four minutes of screen time! That's the level this show operated on.

The stupid! It burns! And then, to top it all off, they brought the entire cast of the Sopranos onstage for a bow, just because. This is the kind of tribute most shows have to wait twenty or thirty years for. Ridiculous.

I've already spent more time on this dreck than it deserves, and I haven't even gotten to Seacrest's nadir: coming out dressed as if he was Henry VIII in The Tudors. And that was it. He came out dressed in a "funny" costume. Ha ha. My brains were dribbling out of my ears at this point.

I really can't blame Seacrest, though. This isn't his type of gig, and the writers and producers just left him hanging out there. Oh, and another word about Fox's evident cheapness. The show had three, count 'em, three credited writers, with another three, count 'em, three writers credited, (or blamed), with "special host material". There's a reason why these shows are usually written by large teams of writers.

Poor Seacrest got the job because no one, and I mean no one else would do it. Now we know why. And I'm thinking that previous hosts like Conan O'Brien, who had disastrous Emmy nights of their own, are all thanking their stars for Ryan Seacrest today.

Although, I must admit, the opening with the two animated characters from The Family Guy skewering other shows in a musical number was brutally funny -- until I realized that no Fox shows were getting shanked. Typical.

Oh jeez, I haven't even gotten to Fox censoring Sally Field's speech. And the censoring was done with all the flair and panache of the rest of the show: at least three times during the evening, when speeches got a little dicey, the show would cut to a hideous angle, looking down at what looked like a huge disco ball, and the sound cut completely out. The first few times it looked like they were having the worst of technical difficulties. By the time they used it to silence Best Actress in a Drama winner Fields, it was very obvious what they were doing.

Hey Fox! You suck!