Sending good vibes to Bob Odenkirk

Beer is back at the Rose Bowl for the first time in more than three decades, a tacit admission that you can’t get through a UCLA football season without drowning your sorrows. I’d rather drive a couple more hours to Vegas, sample one of these cocktails, head to the sports book and bet on whatever team the Bruins are playing. My winnings would cover the gas costs and maybe the tab at one of these new restaurants.

Oh ... and the Emmys are (kind of) around the corner. Sending good vibes to Bob Odenkirk, while still trying to understand how one of TV’s best dramas, “Better Call Saul,” has never won an Emmy. Makes it kind of hard to take this whole awards thing seriously, doesn’t it?

‘The Daily Show’ turns 25

“The Daily Show” hit the quarter century mark this year, which does not make me feel old at all, mostly just grateful for 25 years of great comedy (and quite a few Emmy wins). We looked at the franchise — arguably the most influential comedy program of its generation — from a number of different angles, including talking with the women who helped create the show (and were “erased” from its legacy) and a lively chat with the current correspondents. I wrote about Trevor Noah’s six-year reign as host and how he initially struggled to put his own stamp on the institution. He has succeeded, I think, beyond anyone’s expectations and should be in line for his first Emmy win this year. (But as I mentioned earlier, voters don’t always see things clearly.)

“The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah.

(Kirk McKoy/Los Angeles Times)

Sometimes the Emmys do get it right

At least, the Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards, which bestowed its entertainment honor to The Times’ Emmy Roundtable program. Yes, that’s a shameless plug. If you missed this year’s conversations with drama actors, comedy actors and showrunners, they live on for your viewing pleasure. And for voters’ consideration next year.

Ethan Hawke, Elisabeth Moss, Anthony Mackie, Emma Corrin, Jurnee Smollett and Hugh Grant were the guests on The Envelope’s Emmy drama roundtable.

(Kirk McKoy, Christina House/ Los Angeles Times; Taylor Glascock, Matthew Lloyd/For The Times; Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock for SAG Awards)

2022 Emmy preview: Jennifer Coolidge in ‘The White Lotus’

Mike White’s HBO Max tragicomedy “The White Lotus” just missed this year’s Emmy eligibility cutoff but could be celebrated next year for its deeply funny, often uncomfortable and uniformly unforgiving satire of moneyed privilege. Jennifer Coolidge is always terrific in just about anything she does but, as Times television critic Robert Lloyd writes, “The White Lotus” showcases this great actor in ways that could provide a wider appreciation.

“‘The White Lotus’ reminds us that Coolidge is an actress, not just a ‘comic actress,’” Lloyd writes, “a phrase that really just means nobody thinks to cast her in drama.” He continues: “Watching her, you feel like anything could happen. There is something just a little dangerous in the friendliest of her performances, even in a conventional three-camera sitcom — something that resides not just in her characters but in how she inhabits them. She is a house full of secret passages, passages she seems to be stumbling on herself from moment to moment and line to line.”

If that makes you curious, “The White Lotus” drops new episodes on Sundays on HBO Max.

Jennifer Coolidge, Murray Bartlett and Jolene Purdy in “The White Lotus.”

(Mario Perez/HBO)