- The 71st Emmy Awards ceremony will be held on September 22, 2019 at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.
- Hosts for the 2019 Emmy Awards have not been announced.
- The 2019 Emmy Awards will air live on Fox TV.
With the possible exception of the ‘TV Movie’ category there’s nowhere on the Emmy Awards ballot that has been impacted more than the digital revolution than the Variety Show. At one point it dominated the television landscape. You can make a compelling case that the first ‘big’ TV show was the Texaco Star Theatre which began on television in 1948 and made Milton Berle one of the first true superstars in the new media. Speaking of ‘making superstars’, The Ed Sullivan Show made so many of them it’s easy to lose count but none as iconic as The Beatles and a Mississippi born truck driver named Elvis Presley.
The Variety Show would continue to flourish in the 60’s and 70’s. One of the biggest was The Dean Martin Show featuring the considerable talents and charisma of it’s namesake. Martin would sing, cavort with his troop of comely women called ‘The Golddiggers’ and cut up with guests like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. He would also show off his legendary comedic timing that was able to make even the biggest stiff look (almost) as funny as former partner Jerry Lewis. As the story goes, Dino didn’t really want to do a variety show when first approached concerned that it would cut into his lucrative movie and nightclub work. Rather than simply turn down the offer from NBC he made what he considered an absurd list of demands. He asked for a salary that he considered outlandish and terms that he thought would be obvious dealbreakers–such as not having to rehearse and only having to show up for the actual taping on the show. As Martin told his family at the time: “They went for it. So now I have to do it.” It worked out very well for Dino–at the time of his death he was the largest individual holder of stock in General Electric, NBC’s parent company at the time.
By the 1980’s, the traditional variety show was on it’s last legs. As a result, the Emmy Awards have been constantly re-engineering the variety related categories which now offers the ‘Variety Talk’ and ‘Variety Sketch’ nominees. Although these are the only remaining relevant subsets of the variety category they’d arguably be a better fit in the Comedy section. Or maybe come up with a new heading for this type of programming–after all, they gave Reality TV it’s own set of awards. Given the minimal relevance of categories such as ‘Outstanding Variety Special (Live)’ we’ll limit the odds markets here to only a few categories. Here are the official SPORTSINSIDER.COM Emmy Awards odds for the Variety/Competition categories:
71ST PRIMETIME EMMY AWARDS 2019 BETTING ODDS
OUTSTANDING COMPETITION PROGRAM
RuPaul's Drag Race +200
The Amazing Race +300
Top Chef +300
The Voice +500
American Ninja Warrior +700
Nailed It +700
OUTSTANDING HOST FOR A REALITY OR COMPETITION PROGRAM
RuPaul/RuPaul's Drag Race -175
Ellen DeGereres/Ellen's Game of Games +300
Amy Poehler & Nick Offerman/Making It +700
Marie Kondo/Tidying Up With Marie Kondo +700
James Corden/The World's Best +700
OUTSTANDING VARIETY TALK SERIES
Late Show with Stephen Colbert +225
Full Frontal With Samantha Bee +350
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver +350
Daily Show with Trevor Noah +500
Late Late Show with James Corden +500
Jimmy Kimmel Live +500
OUTSTANDING VARIETY SKETCH SERIES
Saturday Night Live +135
At Home With Amy Sedaris +250
Drunk History +500
Who Is America +700
Documentary Now +700
I Love You America +700
