The 77th annual Emmy Awards were held in Los Angeles Sunday, with comedian Nate Bargatze hosting the festivities.
The show opened with Bargatze and Saturday Night Live performers Mikey Day, Bowen Yang and James Austin Johnson resurrecting a popular sketch Bargatze has been featured in when he hosts the comedy show.
It centered around a so-called inventor of television, Philo T. Farnsworth, who gave a monologue trying to encourage them to keep working on creating the TV.
"Do not get discouraged. What we create here will one day bring the world shows that inform and educate, shows that make us laugh and cry, and shows about people who when they go to work they switch to different people in their brains, who only remember what happens at work," he said, a reference to Severance.
When Day noted, “I don’t understand that," Bargatze joked, "People who watch it won’t either."
Bargatze also joked about all the different networks that exist and how nobody knows what producers do, and cracked that CBS was the network for white people aka the "Caucasian Broadcasting System."
There were also cracks about streaming, The Bear not being a comedy, a woman getting to host a talk show — but only on Hacks — and more. They also joked that the Emmy wasn’t as prestigious as an Oscar.
"We create a world where the finest artists create worlds of staggering beauty and millions of people will watch ... on their phones while they’re sitting on the toilet,” he ended the monologue. “That is television and this is the Emmys."
Later Bargatze explained a new rule to keep speeches short during the awards ceremony.
He said he will start the show with a base $100,000 donation to The Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and will add or deduct $1,000 based on speeches going over or under 45 seconds.
"Forty-five seconds, that's what you got," he said.