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So, Mad Men won the best drama series award at the Emmys, continuing what’s been a fairly decent year for awards (whether you liked them or not, it was nice to see the creatively defensible No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood both nominated for Best Picture). But something that’s gone noticed by perhaps a columnist or two, but unnoticed by the public at large, is what a dramatic shift this represents from these awards shows a decade (or even just a couple of years) ago. The Best Picture winners for 1997 and 1998 were Titanic and Shakespeare in Love, both of which could not be a further stone’s throw from last year’s nominees (both in terms of content and financial success), while the late 90s television awards were dominated by ER and The Sopranos, both of which were on major channels. What does this mean? That our critical establishment is getting pushed further and further out of the mainstream, into pastures that fewer and fewer average audience members are familiar with, while the mainstream is getting further and further, well, I don’t know, really.

Before I go any further, I’d like to back this up with a few pesky facts, just to show you I’m not making this up completely. The final box office grosses of No Country and Blood were $74 million and $40 million respectively, both far below even The Departed, which easily passed $100 million. Mad Men typically averages about 1.5 million viewers (compare that with the 8.3 million that America’s Got Talent received last week).

On the one hand, this is a really good thing, because it allows quality shows like Mad Men the attention they need to survive outside the huge systems of the major networks that have humongous advertising budgets to market whatever they feel like. It means that smaller places with reasonable budgets might feel emboldened to take more risks with what they’re doing.

On the other hand, this could be a really bad thing, because it means that the people with the money aren’t going to try interesting things anymore, and the divide between the mainstream and the (huh, we don’t actually have a name for the other half of that equation) is only going to grow larger. And, as far as I’m concerned, that would be disastrous, because when communities become closed off and segregated like that, the work stagnates no matter who’s involved. Not to mention, it’s nice to have some things that absolutely everyone can enjoy.

What do you think?

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