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Watch: the Stranger Things kids performing “Uptown Funk” is your morning sunshine

Constance Grady
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.

Well, this is just unfair.

While we peasants sitting at home watching the Emmys from our couches had to sit through interminable brown bag lunch bits, those titans who were actually at the ceremony got to watch the kids from Stranger Things do a cute-as-a-button rendition of “Uptown Funk.“

We watched a sketch where the funniest thing was Jeb BushJeb Bush, how sad is that? — and we could have had this? We watched Mark Burnett’s sick Hillary Clinton burn bomb. We watched Lemonade lose in its second category, and all the while the Emmys knew we could have been watching something better, and they kept it from us.

We could have watched Millie Bobby Brown belt with unearthly poise! We could have learned that Caleb McLaughlin is a pretty good dancer and that Gaten Matarazzo prefers to do the middle-school sway! We could have opened the show with Guillermo awkwardly shushing us for a full minute!

Okay, maybe that last part would have been less exciting. Still, I will remain forever bitter with the knowledge of what I could have been watching on Sunday night, compared with what I actually did watch. The fact that Upside Down Town Funk has finally entered my life at this late date is a cold, cold comfort.

You better watch your back, Kimmel. You’ve earned yourself an enemy in me.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to hang some Christmas lights and decode the secret messages hidden within this song.

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