Friends Faux Pas Mars Emmys.
It's bad enough that Friends is getting regularly beaten in the ratings by Suddenly Susan, but nothing could have been worse than what happened when the Emmy nominations were announced on Thursday. Apparently, John Leverence, director of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, forgot to hit "save" on his computer, and as a result, the script that was read live on national television wrongly listed Friends as one of the five nominees for Best Comedy Series. It wasn't until network and media reps opened the nomination packets handed out immediately after the telecast that anyone realized a huge gaffe had been made--3rd Rock From the Sun had been nominated, Friends hadn't. Unfortunately, staffers at Warner Bros. TV, which distributes the show, had already called the Friends producers with the good news, only to have to explain later that a mistake had been made. The studio asked for and received an official apology from the Academy, which also begged forgiveness from NBC and the show's producers.
And for anyone who needed more proof that this year's nominees were simply a rehash of last year's, Leverence explained in a statement that he prepared the script "on top of last year's computer file." Since four of the five nominees in the Best Comedy category were the same, he simply substituted 3rd Rock for Friends. But then, he says, he forgot to hit save, and the change wasn't recorded when he loaded the file into the teleprompter. "With the extreme confidentiality of the preparation of nomination documents, the error was not caught until after the press conference," said Leverence, who was the only one who saw the list before it was read live on the air.