Yes, indeed I am at the newly named Microsoft Theatre (formerly the Nokia Theatre) in Downtown Los Angeles at the Primetime Emmy Awards. Before I talk about the triple digit heat on the red carpet, I must declare that I really want to party with three women:

Click here to watch the commercial.

While I was backstage eyeing up one of those golden statues, the biggest highlight came Apple Music as they premiered they new spot featuring Taraji P. Henson and Kerry Washington hanging with Mary J. Blige at her crib fantasizing about mix tapes and doing air drums to Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight”. I mean, really! This is everyman’s dream, isn’t it? (Incidentally, this also counts as the winner of my regular feature, “AD OF THE WEEK/MONTH/WHATEVER“.)

Back to the heat…the way you heard celebrities talking about the scorching City of Angels heat, you might have thought they were preparing to join Lawrence of Arabia in the Arab Revolt. There was a lot of moaning about the heat and, I think, Mario Lopez lost 42 ounces of water surrounding all those muscles:

I wasn’t too far from E! News’s Giuliana Rancic and every time she stopped one of the nominees they moaned about how they were making the intolerable expedition from their air-conditioned limousines to the air-conditioned Microsoft Theater without needing an IV for their dehydration. I bet most were secretly wishing they were in Celine Dion’s old Caesars Palace digs with her special climate control system while their tuxedos and Haute Couture melted on the red carpet. Ah, the struggle!

Amish Kitteridge starrring Frances McDormand

The fashion was interesting to say the least. Leading the best dressed were Taraji P. Henson from Empire, Jaimie Alexander from NBC’s Blindspot (see gallery below), and me! There was the Heidi Klum yellow canary disaster too. But my pick for the “I Didn’t Think the Emmys Were This Weekend So I Didn’t Shop for a Dress” goes to Academy Award- (and now) Emmy Award-winning actress Frances McDormand who showed up looking like she rode all week from the Amish farm in preparation. Yikes!

Viola preached! But not everyone was screaming “TELL IT” Meryl Streep-style over Viola’s powerful speech.

Nancy Lee Grahn, known as Alexis Davis to people who watch General Hospital and known as “WHO?!” to people who don’t, was not into what Viola said. Nancy Lee basically screamed “ALLACTRESSLIVESMATTER” on Twitter and went on and on and on.

Mikkos Cassadine needs to come and get his daughter, because Nancy Lee said that Viola is a member of the TV elite who has never faced discrimination and that the Emmy stage wasn’t the place to bring up racial issues in Hollywood. Nancy Lee deleted a few of her tweets, but something called “shift + command + 4″ exists and so Buzzfeed and others screen shot her “greatest hits.”

I don’t know why everyone hated on Nancy Lee. I mean, I, for one, learned something from her rant. The African American history professor tweeted (and deleted) this:

“Heard it and went oh lord ur a great actress just accept it and I heard Harriet Tubman and I thought Its a fucking emmy for gods sake. She wasn’t digging thru a tunnel.”

Nancy Lee is educating us all, because I did not know that the Underground Railroad was an actual tunnel dug by Harriet Tubman.

After Nancy Lee got dragged back and forth and continued to defend herself by saying that she can’t believe she’s getting so much hate, she took back everything she said and farted up this apology:

“I apologize for my earlier tweets and now realize I need to check my own privilege. My intention was not to take this historic and important moment from Viola Davis or other women of color but I realize that my intention doesn’t matter here because that is what I ended up doing. I learned a lot tonight and I admit that there are still some things I don’t understand but I am trying to and will let this be a learning experience for me.”

Translation: “My agent and the executives at ABC made me type this.”


My reaction: Let people have their time and speak with the people they want to speak about. Maybe Nancy Lee needs to read The Secret and gain the power of being positive!

January Jones is no Better Draper…wowza!

The Media Guy’s Instagram Feed!

The Most Beautiful Couple Award: Sophia Vergara and What’s-His-Name

Congrats! That was an amazing speech.

First Coca-Cola and now an Emmy…what an exit for Don Draper.

Matt LeBlanc is still one cool cat.

Maybe it was Jaimie Alexander who brought the heat to the red carpet.

Heidi…Versace…Really?!

Taraji…I’ll make you a mixtape any day!

Julia Louis-Dreyfus: The most successful comedienne of all time.

The post Melting on the Emmys Red Carpet appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

Okay, so where am I?

Top left and around: Taylor, Seacrest, Nick Jonas, Ludacris, me, Iggy, the red carpet, Pia Toscano, and my credential.

I’m in Hollywood getting ready to fly out on another top secret media campaign. Well, not so top secret, more of a non-disclosure, which binds my silences. Before the free drinks flow in the Cathay Pacific Business Lounge, I had a little business to wrap up in tinseltown.


With all the hoopla of the iHeart Radio Music Awards (yes, the red carpet was amazing once again), you may have missed a little tidbit on the official release of the video from my Miss Pilot show called “You Gave Me Love.” While it’s only been watched on my youtube page a few times, a couple of other posts have been watched almost 1,000,000 times combined. I mean, it’s no grumpy cat, but for a little Japanese show that could, I will take it any day of the week:

The past few days have been bittersweet as a countdown to the last days of Mad Men (more on that later). In between it all, a ran across some news that may or may note blow you away.


Breakfast Is Not The Most Important Meal Of The Day…No, your parents did not lie to you. They were just misinformed. As with many studies surrounding food, a majority of the research surrounding breakfast was funded by those peddlers of cereal and bacon (side note: don’t eat bacon) — unsurprisingly concluding that a complete breakfast was necessary to a healthy lifestyle. But, according to a dietician and a cultural historian interviewed by Hopes & Fears, breakfast, as a structured meal, really doesn’t matter. If you’re hungry in the morning, eat! If you’re not, then don’t lay an egg, just eat whenever hunger strikes. The most important thing to remember is that it’s not when you eat, but what you eat. 


The Machines Now Decide If You Get That Job, Based On Your Voice…Decades of voice research has revealed that no matter how happy, or inspired, or serious people try to sound — underneath all that inflection lies a telltale “fingerprint” of a person’s voice that influences how others perceive you. And when it comes to jobs that rely heavily on putting people at ease, or diffusing anger or winning others over, companies are starting to use algorithms to systematically weed out the good voices from the bad. It’s bad news if you’re looking to get into sales or work at a call center, but maybe good news that your career isn’t in dealing with people all day?


Filed under “every great New York media lunch started with a pastrami sandwich, a good drink and a willing client” comes  BEEF GRIEF…The Price Of Pastrami In New York Is Too Damn High. Imagine this sign:

“Due to the increased price of pastrami,” it began, unpromisingly, “we at the Yankee Tavern apologize for the increase in prices for the pastrami items.” 

Yes…Pastrami is in crisis.

This Professor Has Invented A Pill That Eliminates Hangovers…Former chief drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt has answered your sweaty, toilet-bowl-hugging prayers and invented a non-toxic inebriant drug that mimics the effects of alcohol: without the hangover. 


RELATED: DRINK LIKE A MAD MAN AND MAKING IT AT A MAD MAN PARTY

THE END IS NEAR...Mad Men is coming to an end in seven hours of television. I’m a bit broken up about it. Maybe it’s because for 99% of the viewing public it is just great television. For me, I lived it. Watching the drama at Sterling, Cooper, Draper, etc. is like a little snippet of my childhood, only the people are prettier and it’s set in New York. Virtually everything that happened through the first six and a half seasons occurred in my life. Almost as if they read my diary, er, not that I keep one. So, as Don Draper and company get ready to clock out for good, AMC allows us to get up close and personal with our favorite ad team. I suppose you’ll know where I’ll be April 5 at 10p EST.


But before you check out the photos and a trailer for the new season below, get a little reading in. Haley Herfurth of Menatl_Floss reports that since its start in 2007, AMC’s Mad Men has mentioned, discussed, or alluded to a considerable amount of classic literature, from authors like Dante to Mark Twain to Edward Gibbon. Each mention or allusion serves a purpose within the show’s plotline, working either to explain a character, set a scene, or provide context for decisions made or actions taken. So if you’re going to watch a whole day of television, the least you could do is read one of these 12 classics.

Now, without further delay, all of our favorites are featured — Outdoor Soiree Style:

The post Notes from a Tinseltown Weekend appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

So Monday night the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences handed out their beautiful statues at the Nokia Theatre. As always, the Emmys were a snore-filled snooze fest , but luckily there was a brightly shining stoned star who guided us safely through that never-ending mess. (**-more on that in a minute.) 

See more on the Media Guy’s Instagram.

Of course I was late (when am I not?) sheesh! I didn’t have a tux, despite the fact there were tuxedo fittings (gratis) But sometimes you just say fugedaboudit, I’m wearing whatever passes for dapper like grey slacks, a short grey tie (new invention), Prada shoes, and a tux jacket with weird seams that make it look like I’m a reflection in a carnival mirror, and if I have time, I’ll finger-comb some dusty defining paste through my hair in the limo, because YOLO. Or whatever the acronym for “zero effort, I’m only here for the gin and tonic and free cigars from the gift suite” is…

Oh how I love the red carpet, Haute Couture and modified tuxedos. I’ve been nominated twice but thus far unlucky with the golden envelope.

My excuse is that all the same people keep winning.

Low and behold, the 66th Emmys were almost all carbon copies of past years. That’s the problem with the Emmys–they are the only one of the Big Four (Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, Tonys) that have the option to continually nominate the same people for the same body of work. Regardless, the Emmys are THE status symbol for creatives and television actors alike for they are the Mount Everest of TV awards. A Media Guy can dream right?

Hamm: Close but no cigar

The awards also represent something tangible network presidents can present to their board of directors and stockholders and sales departments to use as a tool to get more money out of advertisers. In a word, it is validation. Yet while the Emmys have shown a willingness to accept new forms of entertainment, voters still aren’t quite ready to reward them…which is going to have a unique effect on big media’s bottom line.

Take Netflix, for example. While Hulu, Amazon and others maintain a larger streaming presence overall only Netflix has really gotten a seat at the awards table so to speak. Yet for some reason, despite Netflix’s success in breaking through with nominations, its programming can’t take the big prize and that’s an area the traditional networks still hold a huge advantage in.

** – Spoke with my buddy Allison at dlisted.com and I nearly split a gut with her take on Sarah Silverman…

For those of you looking at the toes poking out of the bottom of Sarah Silverman’s dress and wondering “Did that crazy go barefoot?”, the answer is yes, that crazy B went barefoot. Okay sure, she might not actually be barefoot; she could be wearing a pair of JJ Casuals. But since it’s human cloud of weed smoke Sarah Silverman we’re talking about, it’s probably safest to assume she’s barefoot.

Silverman: Do you want to build a snowman?

The second Sarah Silverman arrived, I knew everything was going to be alright. First she sashayed onto the red carpet looking like a sedated avocado with her breasts out, which is always the look. Then she got freaked out by a talking blonde grasshopper (Giuliana Rancic) and forgot how a microphone works. Then she started fighting with the grasshopper while trying to fix her breasts, at which point, Rancic opened her gold clutch to explain what she brought with her to the Emmys (good idea, distract the stoner with something shiny) and inside it was a vape full of liquid pot. Sorry, did I say full? I mean about 1/3 full, since she clearly inhaled most of it on the way to the Emmys.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the last we saw of a high-as-hell Sarah Silverman. She came back a little while later when she won the award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special, which she accepted by running to the stage barefoot, leaping up the stairs like Stoned Jesus, rambling about space and molecules, and thanking her boyfriend “Mr. Fancy Pants Sheen” (Michael Sheen). Afterwards in the press room, some adorable innocent naive cherub asked Sarah if had smoked weed before the show (aw, stay sweet, you). She answered that she likes to “have a puff as a treat, at appropriate times” (which I guess is the “Bitch, I might be” for more formal occasions), but really, did she even need to answer?

She was barefoot! That’s all the answer you need.

Yet I digress.

Really I didn’t sit there wondering about all of this. I was trying to hold my man crush for Mad Men star Jon Hamm in check. Really, the Academy needs to get their act together. No only do they “owe” me a golden lady statue, but they owe Don Draper one too! Jon Hamm, best actor for “Mad Men.” Academy voters have one more year to make this right. We know where they live you know.

…But that’s another story for another day…

Double the fun: Anna Gunn and Debra Messing (click to enlarge)

Hi Julia! (click to enlarge)

Ah Sofia… (click to enlarge)

The post The Emmys? Fugedaboudit! appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.