Eugene and Dan Levy delivered a charmingly lighthearted monologue to open the 76th Emmy Awards — “Also known as, broadcast TV’s biggest night for honoring movie stars on streaming services,” Dan quipped.
The father-son duo kept things short and sweet, lightly roasting this year’s nominated programs, the television industry, the television-watching audience, and, of course, themselves. At one point, Eugene spoke about all the fathers he’d played over the course of his career, but told his son, “My most rewarding dad role ever has been being your dad… in Schitt’s Creek. Because it got me my first acting Emmy.”
Elsewhere, Eugene celebrated all the positive ways great TV reflects our lives — whether we’ve struggled to make friends in a new city like Carrie Coon in The Gilded Age, or had a teacher that’s changed our lives like Quinta Brunson in Abbot Elementary. Dan echoed the sentiment, joking about all of us who’ve had a “co-dependent, borderline homoerotic relationship with our boss, like Hannah Einbinder in Hacks.”
The pair later celebrated Shogun for already making Emmy history with its 14 Creative Arts Emmy victories, which already makes it the most decorated show in a single season. Dan praised the hit program’s attention to detail, noting the way scripts were written in English, translated to Japanese, re-written, and then translated back into English subtitles “that you missed because you were also on your phone watching Sabrina Carpenter eat a hot wing.”
And Eugene peeled off a superb quip about The Bear, noting it was nominated for 23 Emmys, making it the most-nominated comedy in Emmys history. “Now, I love the show, and I know some of you might be expecting us to make a joke about whether The Bear is really a comedy,” Eugene said. “But in the true spirit of The Bear, we will not be making any jokes.”
The Levys closed out their monologue with a not unfamiliar awards show request: To keep things moving along during acceptance speeches, please, for the sake of time. But their plea was borne out of a very particular anxiety: “In what can only be described as a cruel joke, two Canadians have been put in charge of playing you off tonight,” Dan deadpanned.
“Canadians don’t like interrupting anybody,” Eugene added. “It goes against our nature.”
While the Emmys have often featured multiple hosts over the years, this is the first time in the show’s history that a father and son have helmed TV’s big night together. The event also gives the pair a chance to take the Emmys stage together, in person, after Schitt’s Creek swept the comedy categories in 2020, but everyone had to accept their awards virtually because of Covid-19.
In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, the Levys spoke about the gig, with Dan revealing they’d been asked before, but saying “it didn’t feel like the right time for whatever reason.” When they were asked to host this time, Dan quipped, “I think I ran out of reasons not to do it. It seemed like a fun little challenge — not little, quite huge actually.”
Eugene added: “We were both obviously kind of nervous, because it’s kind of a tough thing to do — you’re letting yourself out there and whatever, whatever, is it worth it? We could coast into the fall quite easily without doing this and have a fun time watching it on TV. But I guess something was drawing us into it — like, we could do it, it could be fun. We opened the SAG Awards a few years ago, and we had a ball doing it, and also it turned out really well; it seemed to work, and we got a taste of what that’s like. So we jumped in and said yes. And what can happen, really?”
Between them the Levys have eight Emmy awards, with four each. Eugene won his first two in the Eighties, both for Outstanding Writing in a Variety or Music Program for SCTV, while he picked up his other two in 2020: Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy for Schitt’s Creek. Dan also received the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series that year, along with Supporting Actor in a Comedy, Directing for a Comedy, and Writing for a Comedy. He was most recently nominated in 2021 for hosting Saturday Night Live.
