The seventieth Primetime Emmy Awards aired on NBC, and the network was pitiless about reminding us. In the lower third of the screen, teasers for the new fall shows plumed like puffs of ragweed pollen. Above, a bevy of “Saturday Night Live” stars bustled around like stewards of an institution, going easy on catchphrases and heavy on vaudeville bonhomie. Colin Jost and Michael Che, of “Weekend Update,” were the nominal hosts; the vibrations the pair emitted were those of ushers or attendant lords or altar boys, mostly. They weren’t around long enough to grow tiresome. All the while, Lorne Michaels, the “S.N.L.” majordomo and the producer of the Emmys telecast, sat in the Microsoft Theatre smiling softly, like a healthy hawk owl. During a commercial break, clocking the teaser for the forthcoming National Geographic drama “Valley of the Boom,” some of us noted Michaels’s resemblance to the Netscape executive James Barksdale as played by Bradley Whitford.

Kate McKinnon and Kenan Thompson gathered a diverse array of actors and comedians to sing and dance about having solved the problem of diversity. This was the general thrust of the production’s politics: civic-minded, jaded but not complacent. The song, “We Solved It!,” was dedicated to the rhetoric of inclusivity, and it gritted its teeth at its toothlessness. The number jested, a little, at self-congratulation as practiced among liberals and in Hollywood, but it also was itself a little self-congratulatory—and a little self-admonishing.

The broadcast, by reflex, seized the roundness of its anniversary year as a special occasion to honor tradition, to reminisce about elders, to pump a spritz of nostalgia into the airwaves. Because the present is rancid, the impulse toward escapism is justifiable, but the show didn’t really want to talk about the past. (Even the parade of “S.N.L.” alums scarcely reached further back than Will Ferrell.) The multi-part gag in which Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen played ill-prepared Emmy historians—a running joke that puttered along and never achieved velocity—was premised partly on the idea that there is bliss in the total ignorance of television history. (Really, Rudolph and Armisen could have done something with the fact that the word Emmy is a bit of vintage jargon—a fond diminutive for “image orthicon pickup,” a transformational model of camera tube.)

There were two instances in which the broadcast truly engaged with TV history. One was the fine moment with Betty White, whose jewelled irises rhymed with her enchanted earrings. The other was the evening’s high point: Che’s excellent “Reparations Emmys” bit. Here, we saw footage of him bestowing a trophy—supposedly won by Bill Cosby, for “I Spy,” and stolen from him—on black sitcom stars of bygone lineups. The sequence was partly about the pleasure of seeing Marla Gibbs, and partly about the suggestion that the television industry is running past schedule to reconcile itself with its past.

As a show in itself, distinct from a cultural rite and industry ritual, these Emmys were entirely reshaped by Glenn Weiss, a winner for his direction of the Academy Awards, proposing to his date while on the air. In a spectacular display of timing, tone, and savvy, Weiss pop-cultured the question. His shock-and-joy tactics marked an emotional acme. It was an honest-to-God, yell-at-the-screen moment of the most intense sort, and a live-TV phenomenon of a type that grows rarer as time shifts forward. Much else that followed it was bound to feel like denouement, but the glow of the moment refreshed a jaundiced eye, so that the show-capping victory for “Game of Thrones,” though predictable and dull, was also as soothing as cheese sauce.