The Emmys will honor Cory Monteith but not Jack Klugman or Larry Hagman. Where in that sentence you said “Who?” will tell us how old you are.
AP (“Actor deserves individual Emmy tribute, son says“):
The exclusion of Jack Klugman from an Emmy Awards tribute that includes Cory Monteith is an insult to the memory of the late TV veteran and three-time Emmy winner who starred in “The Odd Couple” and “Quincy M.E.,” Klugman’s son says.
“I think it’s criminal,” said Adam Klugman in an interview with The Associated Press. “My dad was at the inception of television and helped build it in the early days.”
Ceremony producers announced this week that five individual salutes would be included on Sunday night’s Emmy show in addition to the traditional “in memoriam” segment that groups together industry members who died in the past year.
Besides Monteith, the “Glee” star who died in July of a heroin and drug overdose, those to be honored include “The Sopranos” star James Gandolfini; Jean Stapleton of “All in the Family”; comedian and actor Jonathan Winters; and “Family Ties” producer Gary David Goldberg.
Monteith, who was 31 when he died, is by far the youngest of the group. All the others are Emmy winners, while he had yet to be nominated in his abbreviated career.
Emmy nominees who died last year and won’t be accorded separate tributes include Larry Hagman of “Dallas” and Charles Durning of “Evening Shade.”
Hagman, Durning and Klugman will be included in the group remembrance, an academy spokesman said Friday. The ceremony at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles airs at 8 p.m. EDT Sunday on CBS.
“It’s an insult and it really seems typical of this youth-centric culture that has an extremely short attention span and panders to only a very narrow demographic” of young adults, Adam Klugman said.
It seems obvious that both Klugman and Hagman, both of whom starred in two iconic television series in two different genres, are deserving of being honored individually. (Durning, too, was great but he’s less well known, was primarily a character rather than lead actor, and was mostly known for his work on the stage and big screen, not television.) Arguably, they’re more important figures than even Stepelton and Goldberg.
There’s really no “Emmy” case for including Monteith, of whom I had never heard before his sad, self-inflicted demise. I never saw and, if I live my life right, will never see an episode of “Glee.” But there’s a pretty strong “Emmys” case for including a guy who died, even if by his own volition, at the peak of his career and who appeals to a younger demographic than two guys who died at a ripe old age decades after their prime.
