LOS ANGELES — The 2025 Emmy Awards kicked off with a sketch celebrating “the most powerful medium ever created.”

First-time host Nate Bargatze teamed up with “Saturday Night Live” cast members Bowen Yang, Mikey Day and James Austin Johnson for the opening of the 77th Emmy Awards in a skit that imagined how television came to be. Bargatze portrayed Philo T. Farnsworth, the “visionary genius” who saw the potential of television’s future.

As Farnsworth, Bargatze waxed poetic about the medium that will “bring the world shows that inform and educate [and] shows that make us laugh and cry.” He went on to talk about the various channels he dreamed of that will exist for everyone’s interests, including the Travel Channel, Food Network and the History Channel.

The most risque joke of the sketch came when Farnsworth mentioned that there would be channels for people of every culture, including “Telemundo for Spanish-speakers and BET — Black Entertainment Television.” When asked if there would be a network for white people, he mentioned Emmys airer CBS, which one of Farnsworth’s assistants described as “the Caucasian Broadcast System.” (Yang’s question about a network for Asians went unanswered.)

Bargatze returned to the stage to explain his plan on how to keep the evening’s event running on time through an incentive involving a donation to the Boys & Girls Club.

For “every second [the winners] go over 45 seconds [in their acceptance speeches], we will deduct $1,000 away from the Boys & Girls Club [donation],” said Bargatze. “If [the winners] go under, we will put $1,000 a second back on. ... Don’t go crazy though, because I am paying for this.”

In an interview in the lead-up to the Emmys, Bargatze told the Times that his main hope for the show is that “everybody just has fun.”

When asked whether he felt any pressure to incorporate politics or any other hot-button issue in his monologue, he admitted, “There were a couple jokes [written for me] that I’d be like, ‘I don’t know if I want to say it.’”

“But everybody knows that I wouldn’t,” said Bargatze. “Because you can say stuff in a way that would have broad appeal on [certain controversial issues], but it’s a matter of, ‘Do I even want to bring it up?’ I’m sure people are gonna have speeches and want to say whatever they want to say and they go do it. But for me, I should be the constant palate cleanser. What I think or believe or any of that stuff just doesn’t matter for the purpose of what I’m doing. I’m there to be entertaining and move the show along. So I’ll just do me.”

The 2025 Emmy Awards show is being broadcast live on CBS.

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