'Idol' Hand Ryan Seacrest Put to Work On the Emmys

Will "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest be able to lure that show's millions of texting-crazed teens to a three-to-four-hour trophy show in which William Shatner is favored to win best supporting actor in a drama series?

Seacrest, who last week was named official celebrity-sightings correspondent/halftime host for the next Super Bowl, has just been named host of the Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony, which is right around the corner, on Sept. 16.

"Ryan Seacrest appeals to a broad audience, including the highly desirable young adult demographic, so he should serve as a magnet for attracting a diverse array of viewers to our Emmy telecast," Dick Askin, chairman and CEO of the Television Academy, said optimistically in yesterday's announcement.

Yes, this is very late in the game for the TV Academy and Fox, this year's broadcasting network, to be announcing the host of the television industry's annual slap-itself-on-the-back show, which would have ranked 264th among individual telecasts had it actually aired during the TV season last year.

(The Primetime Emmys usually airs the night before the official start of the season, but last year it aired about three weeks earlier because it was on NBC and, turns out, the network's NFL commitment trumps Primetime Emmy Awards in much the same way paper trumps rock.)

For comparison's sake, the Academy Awards was the second-most-watched individual telecast, behind only the Super Bowl.

But hey -- the Primetime Emmy Awards is the fourth-most-popular trophy show, falling behind the Academy Awards, the Grammys and the Golden Globes.

Last summer's Emmycast copped about 16 million viewers, the franchise's second-smallest audience since 1990. That year it aired on Fox, which was in its infancy and not as widely available in parts of the country as the Big Three broadcast networks.

Here's where Seacrest and those texting teens step in.

Last season he hosted 29 of the 33 most-watched individual telecasts of the 2006-07 TV season. All were "American Idol" episodes; many of them were live and all involved Seacrest being the center of gravity as people with enormous egos and varying degrees of talent danced wildly around him.

Seacrest is the Practically Perfect Primetime Emmy Awards host, once you get over whining about him not being a stand-up comic like the other Primetime Emmy Awards hosts the past several years and about how is he going to handle the traditional five-minute opening joke-fest written by comic/host and his/her entourage of writers/hangers-on.

"One thought I had was to not pretend to be a comic," Seacrest told The TV Column in response to our rude "but you're not a comic" question.