The 2014 Emmy Awards

Monday night’s Emmys, hosted by Seth Myers, were dominated by two TV shows, a smattering of funny moments, and one shameful bit involving Sofia Vergara and a pedestal. Here’s what went down and how.

Join us for the Emmys, explained.

Like many awards shows, The Emmys use the “zoom in on all the nominees while the winner is announced” cam to simultaneously show heartbreak, joy, and condescension, all while one is dead inside. Here’s what happened when some of your favorite actors and actresses were put in one of the toughest acting situations of their careers:

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy

Winner: Ty Burrell, Modern Family

Modern Family and Breaking Bad repeated their wins for Outstanding Comedy and Drama Series, respectively, at the Emmys. It was the fifth win in a row for Modern Family and the second for Breaking Bad.

It made for a great valedictory lap for Breaking Bad, which ended its run last year, shortly after the Emmys where it won its first Drama Series award. This year, the show also won awards for writing and editing, as well as three acting awards for Bryan Cranston, Anna Gunn, and Aaron Paul. In his speech accepting the award, the series’ creator Vince Gilligan thanked the Academy for recognizing the show in a boom season for great TV drama.

Bryan Cranston won the award for Lead Actor in a Drama Series Emmys for his role as Walter White in the final season of Breaking Bad.

“I did happen to stumble upon finding a passion that created a seed and bloomed into something so wonderful for me,” Cranston said during his acceptance speech. “I love to act. It is a passion of mine, and I will do it until my last breath.”

Julianna Margulies won the Emmy for Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her role on The Good Wife, playing political wife-turned-lawyer Alicia Florrick. The award is Margulies’ second Emmy win for the series, which was in its fifth season this year. She last won in 2011.

The episode Margulies submitted, “The Last Call,” featured Alicia grieving a terrible loss — one she alluded to in her acceptance speech, referencing to the departure of Josh Charles from the show. “I miss you every day,” she said. “What were you thinking?”

Perhaps concerned that the Emmys hadn’t filled their quotient of “ironic” sexism and/or racism, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences President Bruce Rosenblum presented the usual spiel about the missions of the Academy (and, by extension, the Emmys), boiling the whole statement down to the importance giving everybody something to watch.

That was all well and good, but his idea of something good to watch was to put Sofia Vergara atop a rotating pedestal, complete with her asking if this was how it’s done in America, for added creep factor.

At Monday night’s Emmy Awards, prior Emmy winners Bryan Cranston and Julia Louis-Dreyfus presented the Best Actor in a Comedy Series Emmy:

They, of course starred together on Seinfeld where Louis-Dreyfus played Elaine. Long before Bryan Cranston had his amazing Breaking Bad turn as Walter White, he played Elaine’s fleeting love interest Tim Whatley.

In a skit shown at the 2014 Emmy Awards, Billy Eichner (from Billy on the Street) and Seth Meyers accosted people on the streets of New York to ask them questions about popular culture. Eichner, holding a microphone, accosting people to ask them what an Emmy was, what they thought about Mindy Kaling getting snubbed, and see if they knew Seth Meyers’s name.

Surprising people on the street is … surprisingly entertaining. This guy thought Seth Meyers was Seth McFarlane:

Julia Louis-Dreyfus won her third Emmy in a row for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her work on HBO’s Veep. Louis-Dreyfus plays the foul-mouthed vice president Selina Meyer, whose presidential aspirations made for some of her best comedic work ever in the show’s third season.

Louis-Dreyfus has won five Emmys, spread across three shows. She won the Supporting Actress in a Comedy award for her work as Elaine on Seinfeld, then won her first Lead Actress in a Comedy prize for the series The New Adventures of Old Christine. She’s dominated the field for Veep, having won three times for three seasons.

Jim Parsons has won his fourth Emmy for Best Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for his work on The Big Bang Theory. He’s won the award four out of the last five years, with his only loss coming to Jon Cryer (from Two and a Half Men) in 2012.

Parsons took the opportunity to thank his father in his speech. Mickey Parsons, he said, died before all of the craziness attached to Big Bang Theory began. He thanked his father for supporting him.

Breaking Bad

Modern Family

Why are the Emmys on a Monday? And in August, no less? Well, we have your answers, both short and long.

The short answer: Football.

The Emmys are tonight, and the ballots were returned earlier this month. Heck, the Academy has already given out around two-thirds of its awards at the Creative Arts Emmys that were held a week ago Saturday. The big winners at that ceremony included Saturday Night Live, Sherlock, True Detective, Game of Thrones, and Cosmos, but the Creative Arts awards often bear no relation to the awards given out at the main ceremony, because different people vote for these different awards.

The Emmys are also notoriously hard to predict, because it’s never completely obvious when the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences is just going to lose interest in something out of nowhere. But we’ve surveyed the episode submissions and campaigns, and we think these picks have a better-than-average chance at winning. And, hey, maybe we’ll be right about some of them!

The process of getting nominated for an Emmy is long, convoluted, and hopelessly strange. But once you’re nominated, everything else is pretty simple. You just have to pick an episode that best represents your work on the program, to appeal to the blue ribbon panel that picks the winner in your category. Or, if you’re nominated in a series category, you have to pick six episodes. Easy, right?

Well, this is one of those things TV people screw up more often than not. John Goodman, for instance, probably should have won a couple of Emmys for his groundbreaking work on Roseanne, but he often selected episodes that his character didn’t figure in prominently and, therefore, went unrewarded.

AMC’s meth-fueled drama Breaking Bad led the winners at the 30th annual Television Critics Association Awards, winning accolades for Program of the Year for the second year in a row. The series was honored for its final eight episodes, which aired last summer.

Despite winning the big prize, however, Breaking Bad won only that one award, as the others were spread across nine other series. It was a diverse slate for the organization, which only awards shows in a handful of categories. Other big winners included Veep, Orange Is the New Black, True Detective, Louie, and The Good Wife. (A complete list of winners is below.)

Every year, the Emmy nominations are announced, and every year, TV fans grouse about how the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has snubbed some of the best work being done on TV. Some of this is because there’s just so much good TV right now that you can easily fill any one of these categories and still have lots of great shows left over. Some of it is because the Emmys get weirdly attached to certain shows and performances and nominate them over and over and over again. And some of it is because the extreme niche-ifying of TV means that some of the shows people online are obsessed with – like, say, Orphan Black ­– are only watched by a tiny handful of people in the live Nielsen ratings, the numbers the TV industry most cares about.

But the main reason why the nominations are the way they are is because the Emmys are guided by an arcane system of rules and guidelines that seem as if they were drawn up by a medieval guild of wizards. Seriously. If you ever take the time to read the Emmy bylaws, you’ll wander into a confusing hedge maze of procedure and qualifications, most of which were written when TV was just ABC, CBS, NBC, and a few programs on the various networks that evolved into PBS. Now that TV has so many options — and some aren’t even on TV proper — the Emmys haven’t done much to change with the times. Indeed, there was some question last year if programs on Netflix would even be eligible for Emmys. (Clearly, they are now.)

Here’s a brief guide to the unexpected picks and bizarre omissions among the 2014 Emmy Awards nominations:

The snub: No love for The Good Wife. The fifth season of The Good Wife was one of its best and most consistent, and it featured some absolutely riveting story lines. The show also provided the most talked-about moment in television history since Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding. Julianna Marguiles (Alicia Florrick), Christine Baranski (Diane Lockhart), and Josh Charles (Will Gardner) were all fantastic and were nominated for their work. It’s a shame the show wasn’t.

The 66th Emmy Awards are upon us. Here’s everything you need to know about how the best talents on television will be recognized this year:

The Emmy is the biggest award given to television performances. The award is given by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. The Emmys are awarded every year on the Sunday before the fall television season premieres.

On Thursday morning, the 66th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards Nominations were announced. The big winner this year appear to the HBO, with over 20 nominations in the major categories thanks to shows like Veep and True Detective and movies like The Normal Heart. Here’s the list of nominees in the major categories:

Outstanding Comedy Series

On Monday night, HBO’s The Normal Heart was recognized with an Emmy win for Outstanding Television Movie. During his acceptance speech, Ryan Murphy, the movie’s director, said that he hoped the movie inspire young people to be “Larry Kramers.” Here’s a brief explanation of Larry Kramer’s life, what he fought for, and why The Normal Heart is so important.

The Normal Heart is a largely autobiographical play from 1985 written by Larry Kramer about a gay man living through the HIV-AIDS Crisis in New York City in the 80s.