Condensed cinema stands alone

AMONG the many Emmy Awards that will not be given out tonight -- because they were given out earlier, along with the myriad "creative arts" awards, in such categories as directing, music, casting and best animated, documentary and children's programs -- is the Emmy for outstanding commercial. Quite possibly you did not know there was such a thing, and perhaps now that you do, you question whether there should be, commercials being in some sense the natural enemy of television programs, as a mongoose is to a cobra.

And yet the best commercials are at least the equal of the best TV shows. Pound for pound, they are undeniably the most fully conceived, finely tuned, ambitiously mounted, exquisitely executed things on the air -- a direct result, of course, of their lasting only 30 to 120 seconds and costing as much as or more than whole episodes of what they are designed to interrupt. At the same time, the money advertisers pay to broadcast commercials is what allows commercial television to spend money on itself, to put on as slick a show as it does, to afford Charlie Sheen.

This will all change eventually, but for now we remain in the age of the TV commercial, when an advertisement can be news as much as the thing it interrupts. (Think of the Super Bowl.) And the old medium is already merging with the new media: The most arresting, funny or spectacular advertisements now go round and round the Internet like horses on a carousel (at no extra cost to the advertiser). Brief enough to easily download and well within the limits of the contracting modern attention span -- a model of economy, is a TV commercial -- they are made to order for the viral world.

The Emmy nominees -- which is to say, the four biggest vote getters of the 101 entries on the ballot -- were "Concert" for Ameriquest, "Clydesdale American Dream" for Budweiser, "Stick" for FedEx, and "Required Reading" for Hallmark. (The award goes to the ad agency and production company, not to the client.) "Concert" is one of a series of clever, slightly dark spots in which, to illustrate the tag line "Don't judge too quickly," various characters are caught in what look like compromising positions; in the nominated spot, a man appears to a pair of policemen to be soliciting his own teenage daughter for prostitution as she leans in at the window of his car. "Stick" is set in an expensively realized prehistoric world in which a caveman unsuccessfully attempts to mail a stick by carrier-pterodactyl, only to be upbraided by his caveman boss for not using FedEx. ("Not my problem," the boss says when the caveman protests that the company hasn't been created yet.) In the long and measured "Required Reading," a grown man learns to read in order to finally read old birthday cards. And in the Budweiser ad, a young Clydesdale's greatest wish is to slip into a yoke and pull a wagonload of beer.