As A-list TV Gays like T.R. Knight and Neil Patrick Harris experienced the Emmy awards en ronde inside the industry-embracing walls of the Shrine Auditorium, their lesser-known counterparts piled into West Hollywood drinking establishment East West for an "OUT at The Emmys" viewing party. Defamer videologist Molly McAleer was on hand to capture the red carpet arrivals, which she edited together into a touching tribute to emerging talent she calls Gay D-Listers Spelling Their Names for the Cameras. Alas, it's but one on the minor job hazards on their way up Hollywood's slippery velvet ladder, one Logo-reality-series step at a time.

· Last night's Emmys drew the second-smallest TV audience in the awards show's history with an anemic average of 13.1 million viewers. No one, it seems, was tantalized by the sketchy possibility of Britney Spears showing up to apologize for destroying her career, or by the prospect of emergency host Ryan Seacrest breaking into song. Congratulations, America: you saved yourself over three hours of torture. (We were not so lucky.) [Variety]
· Tina Fey hopes 30 Rock's big win for Best Comedy Series will bring viewers to her show—obviously, she wasn't privy to the preliminary Emmy Nielsens when she made that crazy wish. [THR]
· AMC has an Emmy coming-out party, capturing four awards for Broken Trail. [Variety]
· Remember Pop-Up Video, the show that provided you with amusing, if useless, factoids about the "music videos" one used to be able to watch on VH1? It's coming back in a mobile format, allowing you to learn everything you ever wanted to know about "Hollaback Girl" by staring at your cellphone's tiny screen while stopped at a red light. [THR]
· Internet-creating former VP Al Gore doesn't even know the URL of his interactive TV network's website. [Update: Whoops, yes he does!] [variety]

It's telling that seemingly the only thing worth discussing following last night's Emmys—an exercise in show business self-gratification only marginally more entertaining than watching a Lassie stand-in lick its genitals between camera set-ups—are the three words we weren't allowed to hear (to review: "screwing," "[shit]," and "goddamn") during the telecast.

Having smoothed the feathers ruffled in their tense disagreement about the Obama Girl video, Huffpo blogger Rachel Sklar and Star mag talking head Julia Allison turn their Solomonic incisiveness to a meatier project: liveblogging the Emmys. The thing is kind of epic, so if you're pressed for time, here's your takeaway: Julia Allison has never heard of "Roots." Kids today. [HuffPo]

Was the production team behind last night's Emmy awards oversensitive or just incompetent? During three separate incidents, the camera cut away to an overhead shot and killed the sound. While a case can be made that cutting away from Sally Field's anti-war polemic was probably for the best (she went on and on), and that it made sense to pull back from crazy Katherine Heigl as soon as she mouthed the word "shit," what in the world was Fox thinking by interrupting Ray Romano? Guy couldn't say something offensive if he tried. Unless, you know, you find banality offensive.

We're still (pretty unsuccessfully) trying to shake off our Emmys hangover—drinking was really the only way to make it through all three-plus hours of last night's telecast without going insane from boredom—but we're now lucid enough to tackle the "mystery" of that trio of perplexing cuts (compiled in the above clip) from Ray Romano, Katherine "If You Call Me Hi-Jel I Will Fucking Cut You" Heigl, and Sally Field to the giant, profanity-erasing Sphere of Censorship hanging in the rafters of the Shrine.

Did you catch the Emmy awards last night? In cased you missed it, our Richard Blakeley has put together a montage of host Ryan Seacrest's queeniest moments and provided some subtitles for the three of you who might miss the joke. (We think Richard is auditioning for a job doing video for Perez Hilton! This is like, one step away from drawing splooge bubbles™ on Ryan Seacrest's face.)

We're well aware that "spoilers" for virtually every award handed out during tonight's Emmys telecast are readily available on these internets, but we've avoided ruining what we're sure will be a evening of amazing surprises by checking news sites or watching the east coast feed. Join us, if you will, in submitting to the Fox network's tape-delay illusion that we're experiencing Emmy magic as it happens.

After much soul-searching and the realization that we really have nothing better to do on Sunday night, we decided we'll probably* be liveblogging the Emmys. If watching the show with a computer on your lap is the sort of thing that interests you, check back here at 5pm PST (or if we can't find someone with the east coast satellite feed, come by at 8pm PST for a tape-delayblog). See you then, maybe!

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· Not to be outdone by Oprah Winfrey's lavish Barack Obama fundraiser—attended by the likes of Will Smith, Jamie Foxx and Chris Rock—lesser community-outreach deity Magic Johnson hosts one for Hillary Clinton at his Beverly Hills home. [Variety]
· Finally convinced it won't lead to an assist-tent-city for Valkyrie crew members to work out their shoulder knots and lingering Hitler-thetans, Germany reverses its decision not to let the Tom Cruise movie shoot at a historical execution site. [Variety]
· Al Gore's presence at this year's Emmy awards has been confirmed, where he'll be called upon to solicit an apology from Britney Spears for "squandering her one comeback chance and rendering polar bears extinct." [Variety]
· Alyssa Milano will star in Wisegal, a Lifetime movie about a female mobster that will require her to tap into the brash street-smarts of a Samantha Micelli, and the steely business sense of an Angela Bauer. [THR]
· New Line hires the Ghost World screenwriting team of Terry Zwigoff and Dan Clowes to rewrite (and Zwigoff to direct) The $40,000 Man, about an injured astronaut rebuilt as a bionic man on "a measly budget of only $40,000." We're seeing Will Arnett trying to catch up to a moving bicycle, accompanied by the familiar sound effect. [THR]

Some measure of redemption for Britney Spears, whose disastrous VMAs performance was so universally derided that the one person on Earth willing to leap to her defense has become an international media superstar, may be just an uncomfortable, one-armed hug from Ryan Seacrest away. Us Weekly's website is reporting that Spears is "in negotiations" to put in an appearance at the Emmys on Sunday night, where she can apologize to millions of TV fans for her nationally televised attempted euthanasia of her enfeebled music career:

· NBC might be aborting the only new comedy it was planning to launch this year, its midseason adaptation of the British sitcom The IT Crowd—a potentially surprising development given that newly installed programming rock-star Ben Silverman's entire development philosophy involves the recycling of foreign hits for American eyeballs. [THR]
· At first, we misread the headline "Emmys party circuit heats up" as "Emmys circuit party heats up," a mistake that left us momentarily impressed by Variety's willingness to explore the awards season sexual subculture. Unfortunately, once we figured out our error, the actual story about the battle between ET/People and TV Guide to throw the best, thoroughly vanilla Emmy bash lost much of its sizzle. [Variety]
· Ricky Gervais plots his post-Extras career, taking the starring role in This Side of Truth, a comedy about the first liar in an all-truth world he co-wrote and will co-direct with partner Matt Robinson. [Variety]
· My So-Called Life and thirtysomething creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick are resurrecting Quarterlife, a pilot once killed by ABC, on MySpace, where it will hopefully be watched by millions of "creative twentysomethings" similar to its "constantly blogging" main character. We further expect some Flickring and Twittering to be integrated into its cutting-edge cyberplot. [THR]
· Lavishly golden-parachuted former Viacom execs Tom Freston and Jonathan Dolgen are pouring some of their severance cash into Michael Eisner's Veoh YouTube clone, having been told by hip financial advisors that "the kids love them some virals." [Variety]

As is their custom in the run-up to various awards ceremonies, Newsweek has once again assembled a panel of nominees to discuss issues important to the modern kudos-hopeful, allowing their guests a rare chance to gather together to discuss their craft and make the occasional comment about the absurdity of introducing the notion of competition into their collaborative art form. In their new Emmy Roundtable piece, they've hoarded Masi Oka of Heroes, Entourage's Jeremy Piven, Brothers & Sisters' Sally Field, and Ugly Betty's America Ferrera for the chat, and it didn't take long for Piven, last year's Best Supporting Actor winner for his portrayal of lovable, Gaysian-haranguing agent Ari Gold, to express his frustration over not having more input into creative decisions that might result in more screentime:

In these somber times, conventional wisdom states that the fashion for extravagant awards show gift bags has passed. Still, the impulse to pamper nominees lingers, living on in a circuit of illicit backroom gifting suites, where stars can indulge their most environmentally unfriendly swag urges to stack up on as many Louis Vuitton sable iPhone covers as their hands can carry. Even the stars's pets—spoiled in the past with everything from personal training sessions to therapy—are still trading in on the notoriety of their celebrated, poop-scooping owners:

Believe it or not, Andy Samberg accepting an award for a song about putting his engorged junk in a box wasn't the most controversial break from the tedium of this year's Creative Arts Emmys—a typically staid ceremony one commenter in attendance referred to as "a mind-numbing four and a half hour below-the-line awards show." That honor would go to Kathy Griffin's acceptance speech, and the Savior-sucking sentiments therein:

There was perhaps no better moment in capturing the wildly divergent career paths taken by former Mickey Mouse Club co-stars and lovers Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears than this weekend, when Timberlake not only swept the same MTV trophy ceremony on which Spears hammered the last press-on nail into her comeback coffin, but also managed to score an Emmy award for a boner-joke parody song done as a lark for a Saturday Night Live guest-hosting stint:

· Ang Lee takes home the Golden Lion for Lust, Caution at the Venice Film fest, the movie you may remember as the recent victim of the MPAA's dreaded NC-17 rating because of its "graphic, artsy-fartsy depiction of fucking." [Variety]
· Gus Van Sant attaches Sean Penn and Matt Damon to his long-in-development biopic of openly gay politician Harvey Milk, with Penn playing Milk and Damon taking the role of his suddenly likable assassin. Tomorrow, competing Milk project director Bryan Singer will escalate the casting arms race by announcing he's got Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt "this close" to signing on to his Mayor of Castro Street adaptation. [THR]
· The Creative Arts Emmys are topped by—surprise!—HBO, with 15 statues. [Variety]
· NBC destroys its Sunday night Nielsen competition with the season debut of Sunday Night Football. [THR]
· In other unsurprising, awards-related news, Gil Cates will be back to produce the Oscars a record-breaking 14th time, which he promises "will be just as overlong and filled with inscrutable interpretive-dance numbers as my 2006 triumph." [Variety]

Having steadily risen the variety show emceeing ranks since he was plucked from relative obscurity by the immaculately manicured hand of Merv Griffin himself, it was really only a matter of time before American Idol host and E! red carpet munchkin Ryan Seacrest would be asked to preside over a major awards telecast. But until that day comes, he's more than happy to take on the Emmys. Talking to THR about the high-profile gig, Seacrest spoke of having to stretch past his copy-regurgitating comfort zone into the realm of jazz-hand-waving song and dance man:

While gabby Grey's Anatomy gay-conspiracy victim Isaiah Washington finds himself running out of media outlets willing to let him break his silence yet again about the shadowy machinations that led to his dismissal from the hit show (really, once you've chatted with Star Jones in football metaphors, there's nowhere left to go), reporters are begging Grey's slur-survivor T.R. Knight to say something, anything, about the F-Bomb That Continues To Rock The World of Primetime Television Nearly A Year After The Fact. But not even a bottomless basket of garlic knots and untold glasses of honor-bar chianti at one of Venice's finest family-style Italian eateries could entice the actor to abandon the high road he's so committed to traveling, as the LAT discovered recently: