At the 2016 Emmy Awards on Sunday night, the Academy honored television stars and visionaries who recently passed away in a moving tribute segment.
After an introduction from Henry Winkler, singer Tori Kelly covered Leonard Cohen’s "Hallelujah" while images of stars ranging from David Bowie to Muhammad Ali were shown to the Microsoft Theater audience and to fans watching at home.
While the reactions to the montage and to the show in general have been overwhelmingly positive, some viewers took issue with the notable names that were left off of the "in memoriam" list by producers.
Sadly, 2016 has been witness to a number of untimely celebrity deaths, and while the show honored some stars with tenuous connections to the world of television, it failed to pay tribute to others who were famous primarily because of their roles on beloved TV series.
The star who seemed to generate the most outrage due to her omission was late The Voice contestant Christina Grimmie.
Grimmie was murdered in June of 2016 while greeting fans after a performance.
The Voice won the prize for Best Reality Competition Series, but the show’s producers failed to mention Grimmie during their acceptance speech, and she was not honored during the memorial segment.
"Ok so I’m a little annoyed that @NBCTheVoice won an Emmy & didn’t even mention Christina Grimmie, nor was she honored in the memoriam," wrote one Twitter user, summing up the feelings of many who watched the broadcast live.
"I’m still shocked that they didn’t mention Christina Grimmie in the "In Memoriam" segment at the #Emmys last night," another tweeted this morning.
Unfortunately, Grimmie wasn’t the only recently deceased star who wasn’t honored.
Other stars who didn’t make the cut include WWE icon Chyna, who passed away in April, at the age of 46, as well as Ice Road Truckers star Darrell Ward, and Earth, Wind and Fire co-founder Maurice White.
The Academy tends to be bizarrely secretive about its criteria for choosing stars for the memorial segments at the Oscars and Emmys.
It seems every year that the shows’ producers manage to outrage fans with at least one notable omission.
So perhaps they should be a bit more transparent about the process of producing the segment?
We’re not sure what the answer is, but the failure to pay tribute to beloved figures of the screen probably isn’t helping with the ceremonies’ declining popularity.