CAT ON A HOT TIN EMMY

What can you say about awards shows that hasn't already been said? After watching part of the Emmys last night, I decided the best way to enjoy my TV was to turn it off and open a book called "The Crystal Bucket," a collection of British TV reviews of the 1970s by Clive James.

You'd think TV criticism -- from a newspaper no less -- would offer little to hold anyone's interest beyond the short lifespan, days perhaps or a week at most, of the shows under review. But then you probably haven't read James. This, for instance, is how he launched a review of a 1976 production of the Tennessee Williams play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," which was part of a Granada Television series called "The Best Play of 19--":

Here was the main action, with a meaty part for Olivier as a southern fried patriarch. Southern frard patriarch. The accent gets into your head. Whether the play itself does any more than get on your nerves is another question. I can remember being young enough, long enough ago, to believe that in Tennessee Williams the giant themes of Greek tragedy had returned, all hung about with magnolias. Ignorance of Greek tragedy helped in this view. This was the 1950s, when a lot of intentions were being taken for deeds.

Which sounds strangely like the current Bush administration, but never mind. The review goes on to dissect the play and the performances, and it's hilarious. You might think you understand why just by imagining Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy, Natalie Wood as Maggie the Cat and Robert Wagner as Brick the Thick (James's mot juste for the role). But "they weren't all that bad," James says. What actually makes the review so useful and funny is its insight into the workings of a play with a reputation for exposing the wounds and torturing the nerves of its characters:

Even in this television production the actors had to shout as loudly as they would have had to do on stage, since if they lapsed even briefly into normal tones it would become apparent that every character in the play is doing all the time what normal human beings do only in rare moments of passion -- i.e., say exactly what's on their minds. The convention of raw frankness can only be sustained if all concerned are in a permanent wax. So the actors rant. Rant on stage can look like powerful acting to the uninitiated, but on TV it looks like tat even to a dunce.

To apply James's point to last night's Emmys would be cruel. I'm not thinking about the Olympian shouting match in "The Sopranos" finale, which (all the experts seem to agree) earned Edie Falco and James Gandolfini their awards for outstanding lead actress and actor in a dramatic series. I turned off the awards show before it got that far. But thank God for Ellen DeGeneres, whom I did manage to catch. Her little monologue was priceless.