Drop comedies’ class distinctions

And the nominees for outstanding hairstyling for a series are: “Carnivale,” “Alias,” “Deadwood,” “MADtv,” “Star Trek: Enterprise” and “American Dreams.”

I like this category, even if it won’t be part of the prime-time Emmy telecast. Not only does hair matter in which show I decide to watch, the category is very democratic, a hands-across-the-TV polyglot.

You don’t get this so much in the big categories. Consider the nominees for best comedy, where the smugly-satisfied-with-itself “Scrubs” was chosen along with “Will & Grace,” fresh once upon a time but now getting by, sometimes barely, on double-entendre sex jokes and the work of reliable-trouper costars Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally.

How much more talked-about would the award for best comedy be if the Emmys were less balkanized, if “Desperate Housewives” were going up against the topical comedy of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” say, or “The Simpsons” or “South Park” or “Da Ali G Show”? Not only would this shorten the Emmy night broadcast, it might even force an industry bloated on awards (e.g., outstanding art direction in a multi-camera series as a different category from outstanding art direction in a single-camera series) to think differently in the development process.

I think “Will & Grace” got nominated because when the audience laughs on that series it sounds like the producers are trying to break a world record for loudest sound. But “Scrubs” and “Will & Grace” are likely place-holders in a category where the real horse race involves ABC’s “Desperate Housewives,” CBS’ “Everybody Loves Raymond” and Fox’s “Arrested Development.”

With its 15 nominations overall, “Desperate Housewives” (does the best actress in a comedy snub of costar Eva Longoria mean she won’t be invited with the other gals to “Inside the Actors Studio” either?) is the likely winner here, because it’s wildly popular and a somewhat new flavor on TV if not in the culture at large, a less acidic version of cliched-satire-of-suburbia than the movie “American Beauty.”

Still, it isn’t easy to find a new crawl space between art and commerce working in the confines of network television, something “Desperate Housewives” creator Marc Cherry managed to do more pleasingly than Mitch Hurwitz did in creating “Arrested Development,” a surprise winner in the best writing category a year ago.

As it stands, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences appears to be protecting the venerable old network sitcom, ignoring in the process the pressures on the form that cable has brought to bear. It’s a disconnect that doesn’t so much plague the prime-time drama, where the networks have upped their game to the point that three noisemaking FX dramas got snubbed (“The Shield,” “Rescue Me” and “Nip/Tuck”), while a fun, nasty piece of work like Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House on Fox can compete with Ian McShane’s virtuoso megalomaniac on HBO’s “Deadwood.” And curiously, while crime procedurals are all the rage, not one of them got recognized, including the prototype of the latest batch, “CSI.”

Can you say “Bruckheimer backlash”? Instead there are the likely suspects “The West Wing,” “24” and “Six Feet Under.” But in this, a non-”Sopranos” year, the category’s most intriguing juxtaposition is “Deadwood,” the near-Shakespearean version of a western, going up against an escapist thriller like ABC’s “Lost.”

If “Deadwood,” the best series in this category, wins, HBO gets what its competitors hate: more free advertising, on a broadcast network’s dime, for a low-rated series on a pay service, prompting tens of millions of viewers to wonder just what they’re missing by not having premium cable.

Remember, the Emmys are a television show -- a television show watched by many more people than watch a given television show. To that end, the broadcast ought to be helped by the nominees in the various acting categories, where new faces (Hank Azaria, best actor nominee for Showtime’s “Huff,” and Jeremy Piven, best supporting actor nominee for his turn as an agent on HBO’s “Entourage”) ought to enliven the broadcast.

But acting is a category that can confound. For instance, is Patricia Arquette, best-actress-nominated for NBC’s “Medium,” doing a really good deadpan as a psychic or is she just not acting at all?