I don’t know how many people actually watched the Pandemic Awards – er, I mean the  Emmys - on Sunday, a show that had everything going against it. But somehow they pulled it off.
 
At one point, after Schitt’s Creek’s record breaking run of seven straight wins, host Jimmy Kimmel came back on camera standing beside what I assumed was a replica of the Stanley Cup. Turns out, it was the real thing. But after all the effort to get it there, it almost didn’t make it onto the screen.
 
In a Variety exclusive, co-writer (and Kimmel’s wife) Molly McNearney talks about the Cup and why the gag nearly didn’t happen at all.
 
“We had to get the Stanley Cup...we thought, you know if ‘Schitt’s Creek’ wins a couple of these, we need to kind of rub it in, that they’ll never have the Stanley Cup…
 
“That was Jimmy’s idea, he thought, ‘if Canada’s going to take all our awards, let’s flaunt the award we know they all really want — which is the Stanley Cup.’ So we had it on standby. And then it was tricky for us, when do we bring up the Stanley Cup? Are they gonna win this one or the next one? It was a gamble. Because if they hadn’t won best comedy, then we would have just had a sad Stanley Cup in the wings that would have never brought out on camera.”
 
Considering the potential for disaster, I thought the show went off pretty well. But America apparently didn’t see it. It was one of the lowest rated Emmys in the history of the awards. Which surprised me a bit, because it was also the first such show of its kind in the COVID era and I thought more people would be curious about how it went.
 
In any event, this terrific article reveals what happened behind the scenes that no one ever saw – and how they almost accidentally burned part of the Staples Center to the ground. Worth a read if you watched it or like inside stories you weren't supposed to know.
 
Emmys Behind the Scenes: ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ Co-Head Writer Molly McNearney on What Went Right and What Didn’t