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The Emmy's can't be saved.

That's the only sane reaction to this year's list of primetime nominees. No James Gandolfini and Edie Falco? No love for Hugh Laurie? "My Name is Earl"? "The Shield"?"Everybody Hates Chris"? Alfre Woodard the only "Desperate Housewives" nominee? Stockard Channing for Best Actress in a Comedy? In a year when the nominations were supposed to be better then ever, they actually got worse.

All show business awards are inherently flawed, most of them operating on the chamber of commerce theory that what's best usually takes second to what's best for the industry. But because the same shows and the same actors playing the same characters are eligible year after year, the Emmys tend to be more flawed than most.

So every few years, the TV Academy comes up with a new plan to spruce things up, to bring in new nominees and winners, and with them, hopefully, new viewers.

For years, the only people allowed to vote for the winners were Academy members willing to volunteer for blue-ribbon panels, which would be locked in a hotel room for several days to watch all the submitted videos of the nominees. This ensured that the Emmys were the only entertainment awards where you knew the voters had actually seen the things they were voting on, but it also limited the pool to people who actually could spare several days in a row for the panels. That's a group almost entirely composed of the unemployed and the retired, and they tended to vote for the same comfortable old names over and over.

Tiring of the sight of Tyne Daly or Candice Bergen or Helen Hunt walking up to the podium to give another speech, the Academy abolished the blue-ribbon panels in 2000. Instead, any Academy member who promised to would watch the nominees in their category were sent the submitted videos at home. Whether or not voters kept to the honor system, the turn of the century brought with it plenty of fresh blood: Gandolfini, Falco, Allison Janney, Patricia Heaton, etc.

But after a while, it turned out that the younger voters just had their own group of favorites, and those people kept winning over and over. Even worse, the nominations continued to be done blind -- Academy members just had to check names off a list -- which made it difficult for new people and shows to be nominated, much less win. (People who actually work in television watch less television on average than any group of Americans outside of select monasteries.)

So this year, the Academy decided to add a second, misguided step to the nominating process, in the hopes that worthy shows and performances on fringier networks have a shot. In what was nicknamed "The Lauren Graham Rule," in honor of the never-nominated "Gilmore Girls" star, the entire voting body would make their picks off the list, and then the top 15 in each major category would be screened for ... wait for it ... wait for it ... a blue-ribbon panel!

After working so hard six years ago to make the process more democratic, the Academy handed all the power back to the same self-selecting, star-struck bunch who made the Emmys irrelevant by the end of the'90s. You have to admire organizational stupidity like that.

Who else but the blue-ribbon panelists would have deemed Oscar winner Geena Davis' stiff performance on "Commander in Chief" as better than Falco, whose tearful work in the first "Sopranos" coma episode should have guaranteed her the win? Heck, Davis didn't even give the best performance as a female president on television this season; that would be Mary McDonnell on "Battlestar Galactica," but because that's a show with spaceships and robots on a niche cable channel, it didn't have a shot at getting respect from this crowd.