Your favorite dramas earn more accolades while your favorite comedies are steamrolled by Modern Family on the Primetime Emmy Awards
Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Sunday, September 23. All times are Eastern.
TOP PICK
The 64th Primetime Emmy Awards (ABC, 7 p.m.): A new television season can’t begin until statuettes are awarded for achievements in the previous season.Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game Of Thrones, and Homeland are favored to win big at the 2012 Emmys—while a crop of old favorites and promising newcomers are set to be crushed under the 22 feet of the academy-beloved Modern Family. At least “Remedial Chaos Theory” has a chance to win Outstanding Writing For A Comedy Series… over the Girls pilot, the one-two punch of Parks And Recreation’s “The Debate” and “Win, Lose, Or Draw,” or the most elaborate fart joke Louis C.K. has ever told. Can’t they all just share the prize?
REGULAR COVERAGE
The Thick Of It (Hulu, 5 p.m.): Stewart Pearson continues shoring up his anti-Malcolm bona fides by sending the coalition government on a technology-free retreat. Asking this show’s cast to part with its phones is like asking a deep-sea diver to send up his scuba set in the middle of a dive—David Sims can’t wait to see how they flail about and fight for the last gasp of 4G.
Hell On Wheels (AMC, 9 p.m.): It’s the Pain on the Plains as the Swede and Bohannon square off in a match of wits (and maybe fists) that has Alasdair Wilkins wondering if Hell On Wheels would be better if it only involved Anson Mount and Cristopher Heyerdahl butting heads on a weekly basis.
Boardwalk Empire (HBO, 9 p.m.): “A malt liquor shipment takes an unexpected detour,” reads the last line of HBO’s episode synopsis, leading Noel Murray to devise all manner of fantastical adventures for the wayward booze, like The Red Balloon for gangsters chasing hooch.
Copper (BBC America, 10 p.m.): Let’s take a moment to appreciate the title of tonight’s episode, “Arsenic And Old Cake,” a pun whose namesake play is predated a good 80 or so years by Copper’s 19th-century setting. In light of this anachronism, Sonia Saraiya now theorizes that Detective Corcoran’s nickname derives from the old ABC drama Life Goes On.
Treme (HBO, 10 p.m.): It’s funny: Treme plays out on a longer time lag than The Newsroom, but no one will ever give David Simon shit about that because a.) He’s David Simon and b.) he’s not pretending like the fictional residents of Treme are finding solutions to mistakes real-life people made five years ago. Keith Phipps climbs aboard the third-season time machine and transports back to 2007.