Last night's Emmys offered some welcome new faces among the winners (Jeremy Piven, Mariska Hargitay, Keifer Sutherland, "The Office," "24") but too many undeserving repeats, especially early on in the evening. Are any TV fans really surprised?

This is the Emmys, after all, an awards show so disrespected that its masters allowed NBC to shunt it off to the dead of August, almost a month before its traditional placement at the start of the fall TV season. The Emmys deserve better treatment, but they also need to make better nomination choices in the future.

Even if the TV industry doesn't know how to appropriately honor its own, at least there's more programming that's worth honoring than categories allow, something the film industry hasn't been able to say for a number of years.

I'm just now catching up on episodes of BBC America's "Hex" from while I was gone at press tour in July. That trip West also caused me to miss BBC America's intriguing looking "Life on Mars" and I'm still about a month behind on "Deadwood."