CBS's Go-To Guy, Neil Patrick Harris, to Host Revamped Emmy Awards

Neil Patrick Harris will host this year's 61st annual Primetime Emmy Awards show on Sept. 20, the TV academy will announce after the holiday weekend.

The academy will not announce, however, that it, CBS and the show's producer will overhaul this year's Emmycast in an effort to bring it back from the brink of ratings oblivion. That means, among other things, minimizing the time spent handing out trophies to TV shows hardly anybody saw.

It also means hiring CBS's choice of hosts, Harris, to wipe away the grime left by last year's Emmy-host cabal: Jeff Probst from "Survivor," Heidi Klum from "Project Runway," Tom Bergeron from "Dancing With the Stars," Howie Mandel from "Deal or No Deal" and Ryan Seacrest from "American Idol."

Though the group-host was intended as the TV academy's long overdue nod to the popularity of reality programming, it turned into the most savaged trophy-show opening ever -- the five hosts on stage in tuxedoes, with no prepared material:

"We have absolutely nothing for you," Probst told the audience, with absolute accuracy.

"This is not a bit -- we are on Sarah Palin's bridge to nowhere," Mandel chimed in.

A lifetime later, the hosts finally gave viewers their opening bit's big payoff: William Shatner joining Bergeron to rip off Klum's tear-away tuxedo, revealing short shorts. Woo-hoo!

Harris, in marked contrast to the Five Stooges, got rave reviews just last month when he hosted CBS's broadcast of the Tony Awards. Most particularly, he got high marks for the tune he sang at the show's end paying tribute to the evening's winners -- a song he and others had written as the trophy show played out.

That gig came only weeks after Harris hosted the TV Land Awards, for which he also got great notices. Some industry navel-gazers assumed his state of trophy-show-hosting overdone-ness would preclude him from being a candidate to host this year's Emmycast.

But, since the Tony Awards clocked only 7 million viewers, and the TV Land trophy show got a minuscule 1 million, and since Harris is The Reason to Watch CBS's youngest-skewing series, "How I Met Your Mother," which now has to kick off CBS's Monday comedy lineup, he got the CBS nod and Emmys producer Don Mischer and the TV academy gave Harris their blessing.

Don't expect the academy or network to announce changes to this year's Emmycast until after nominations are announced, on July 16. But changes are inevitable for the franchise, which is in dire straits after last year's broadcast clocked a lousy 12 million viewers on ABC -- its smallest-ever number on a major network. (The Emmy Awards logged about 40,000 fewer viewers in 1990 when it was on Fox, during that network's infancy.)

This year's broadcast is its last chance to prove it can still cop a crowd before the broadcast networks will have to sit down with the academy and decide whether they want to pony up for another multi-year wheel-rotation contract. (There's actually one more year left on the contract, but next year it's on NBC and that network will mess it up, if only because it no longer has the critical mass of viewers to whom it can promote a special event.)

Changes will be made to make the show more commercial to a large, broadcast-size audience, which means minimizing the amount of time spent doling out trophies to programs that had been seen by only a niche audience.

That probably means moving some of the so-called long-form derbies -- miniseries and made-for-TV movies -- to the non-televised portion of the two-day orgy of trophy dispensing.

A hefty chunk of last year's broadcast, for instance, was dedicated to the dispensing of Emmys to HBO's "John Adams." That was a terrific project, of which HBO should be proud -- but it was niche programming.