Time to give underdogs their day

This MONTH has been a big one for critical consensus. On July 17, the nominations for the Emmys were announced, with multiple nominations lavished upon "30 Rock," "Mad Men" and "John Adams." Two days later, the Television Critics Assn.announced the winners of its 24th annual awards, which are voted on by more than 200 critics and journalists. The top dogs? "30 Rock," "Mad Men" and "John Adams"

Well, glad that's all cleared up. But the results left some important questions unanswered. First, are any of these shows better than "So You Think You Can Dance?" And were any of the nominated figures from these shows more compelling than Adhir Kalyan's Raja Musharaff on "Aliens in America," or the addicts on "Intervention"?

This year's award season may look like a breakthrough, with its acknowledgment of basic cable and rejection of some network favorites, but in reality it's status quo.

This year, the nominated dramas have been largely serial (as opposed to procedural), brooding and slightly exotic; comedy nominees tend toward the intellectually quirky. Reality television may as well not exist. Judge television by its award-winners, and it would seem very narrow indeed.

Docu-soaps and fake news and teen dramas and wedding-planning freakouts and talent competitions and clip-aggregator programs have as much to offer as sketch comedy, procedurals, three-camera sitcoms and the evening news ever have. But critics, especially, tend toward certain sorts of shows, reinforcing a predictable set of values, as if there were only a few sorts of pleasures to be taken from television.

A decade or so ago, this would have been a more reasonable position; for generations, TV had been more of a monoculture than even cinema. But today more than ever, it's glorious in its diversity.

The oldest of the major networks may still be hidebound by tradition, but Fox and the CW (and the WB before it) have gone a long way toward evolving the network model. Plus, the explosion of basic and premium cable has done significant work in unseating the hegemony of the broadcast networks. Quality programming took hold a little more slowly on these channels, but nowadays it's not uncommon to discover gems on even the most obscure of them. Why must the old walls matter so?