Emmy nominees a joke

The Emmys can’t be saved.

That’s the only sane reaction to this year’s list of nominees. No nods for “Sopranos” stars James Gandolfini and Edie Falco? No love for “House’s” Hugh Laurie?

What about “My Name Is Earl”? “The Shield”? “Everybody Hates Chris”?

In a year when the nominations were supposed to be better than ever, they actually got worse.

All show business awards are inherently flawed. But because the same shows and the same actors are eligible year after year, the Emmys tend to be more flawed than most.

So every few years, the TV Academy comes up with a plan to bring in new nominees and winners – and with them, hopefully, new viewers.

For years, the only people allowed to vote for the winners were academy members willing to volunteer for blue-ribbon panels, which would be locked in a hotel room for several days to watch all the submitted videos of the nominees.

This ensured that the Emmys were the only entertainment awards where you knew the voters had actually seen the things they were voting on. But it also limited the pool to people who could spare several days in a row for the panels. That’s a group almost entirely composed of the unemployed and the retired, and they tended to vote for the same comfortable old names over and over.

Tiring of the sight of Tyne Daly or Candice Bergen or Helen Hunt walking up to the podium to give another speech, the academy abolished the blue-ribbon panels in 2000. Instead, academy members who promised to watch the nominees in their category were sent the submitted videos at home.

But after a while, it turned out that the younger voters just had their own group of favorites, and those people kept winning over and over.

So this year, the academy decided to add a second step to the nominating process, in the hopes that worthy shows and performances on fringier networks would have a shot.

In what was nicknamed “The Lauren Graham Rule” – in honor of the never-nominated “Gilmore Girls” star – the entire voting body would make its picks, then the top 15 in each major category would be screened by … wait for it … a blue-ribbon panel!

After working so hard to make the process more democratic, the academy handed all the power back to the same self-selecting, star-struck bunch who made the Emmys irrelevant by the end of the ‘90s.

Who else but blue-ribbon panelists would have deemed Oscar winner Geena Davis’ stiff performance on “Commander in Chief” better than Falco, whose tearful work in the first “Sopranos” coma episode should have guaranteed her the win?

Heck, Davis didn’t even give the best performance as a female president on television this season; that would be Mary McDonnell on “Battlestar Galactica.” But because that’s a show with spaceships and robots on a niche cable channel, it didn’t have a shot at getting respect from this crowd.

Speaking of fictional presidents, how do you explain Martin Sheen, who arguably should have won an Emmy by now for playing Jed Bartlet on “The West Wing,” getting nominated again for a season in which he barely appeared?

And Sheen’s fake first lady, Stockard Channing, has enough old friends in the academy to get a nomination for her other series, CBS’ lousy, long-since-canceled sitcom “Out of Practice.”

In fact, four out of the five lead comedy actress nominees came from shows that were either canceled or retired; the lone nominee who’ll return next season is Julia Louis-Dreyfus from “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” and she was nominated seven times before for “Seinfeld.”

There was a sprinkling of new names and faces this time around. After being nominated as a writer but not an actor last year, Denis Leary from FX’s “Rescue Me” got the reverse treatment. NBC’s “The Office” was deservedly nominated as the best comedy on television, and star Steve Carell got a nod as well. And Kyra Sedgwick of TNT’s “The Closer” is up for best drama actress.

But few of the previously ignored got much help this time. Not Graham. Not “Galactica.” Not “Veronica Mars.” Not even “My Name Is Earl,” which graced magazine covers and was credited with saving TV comedy.

Meanwhile, the panelists seemed to go out of their way to rebuke the favorites of the previous voting system. They didn’t only snub multiple winners Falco and Gandolfini, but two-time winner James Spader from “Boston Legal” and all of the lead actresses on “Desperate Housewives.”

No “Sopranos” acting nominations except for Michael Imperioli. No “Lost,” which was named the best drama on television by voters last year, and wasn’t appreciably worse this year.

The only good thing about the nominations is that they’re so blatantly, egregiously wrongheaded that I wouldn’t be surprised if the academy announced plans to re-abolish the blue-ribbon panels by, oh, lunchtime Monday.