It’s Collette, not Fey, as best comic actress

Tina Fey did not win as best actress in a comedy at tonight's Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony. The audience was shocked - "Whoa!" said presenter Justin Timberlake - when Toni Collette, specatcular as the star of Showtime's United States of Tara, took the Emmy for her role as a woman with multiple personalities.

Alec Baldwin, Fey's co-star on NBC's 30 Rock, made up for Fey's failure by winning as best actor in a comedy for the second straight year.

Little Kristin Chenoweth seemed to break down in tears as she took the traditional first Emmy, for best supporting actress in a comedy, as the lovelorn waitress in ABC's dear, departed Pushing Daisies. "I'm unemployed now," she said, "so I'd like to be on Mad Men." The Office and 24 were backup choices.

Jon Cryer won the actor prize in the category, after four nominations for CBS's Two and a Half Men.

The Amazing Race won its seventh consecutive Emmy as best competition reality show. Named best reality show host, Jeff Probst, who is so much more to Survivor than just a host, said he was living his dream. "The adventure you're ready for is the one you get," he said, quoting Joseph Campbell. "Life is short. Go for it."

PBS's delectable Little Dorrit earned two movie and mini-series awards, best director (Davilla Walsh) and writer (Andrew Davies, master Dickens adapter).

HBO cleaned up, as usual, in the realm of TV movies and mini-series. Grey Gardens, about recluse mother and daughter Big and Little Edie Beale, was named best one. Jessica Lange, rightfully, beat out her co-star Drew Barrymore as best actress. Brendan Gleeson was named best actor for Into the Storm. He only played Winston Churchill.

Iranian-born Shohreh Aghdashloo was named best supporting actress in a movie or mini-series for HBO's House of Saddam. Best supporting actor in the category: Grey Gardens' Ken Howard. "I'll make my speech as brief as possible in the hopes that it won't be interrupted by a congressman or a rapper," he quipped. (Bob Newhart, nominated for TNT's The Librarian continued his shut-out run. He has never won an Emmy.)

Emmy made things a little more fun this year by shaking up the order of the awards, handing out all the prizes in one genre, starting with comedy, before moving on to the next.

Neil Patrick Harris, from CBS's How I Met Your Mother, a Broadway star who brought class and fun to this year's Tony Awards, emceed in a white dinner jacket, just two days under the traditional end-of-summer deadline.

He shot the opening of a cannon with a belt-out: "Put Down the Remote." The camera panned to various stars, settling on Mad Men's statuesque Christina Hendricks, as Harris, who is gay, sang, "She could turn a gay straight - oh, wait."

It was Emmy's second year at downtown Los Angeles' 2,200-seat Nokia Theater, in a neighborhood where the city is trying establish an attractive entertainment complex after a long run at the cavernous Shrine Auditorium, about a mile away.

Blake Lively Leighton Meester from Gossip Girl gave out the award for best director of a comedy to Jeff Blitz of NBC's The Office.