Donald Trump might want to take some notes.

Ahead of the 72nd Primetime Emmys from Los Angeles’ Staples Center, host Jimmy Kimmel told Entertainment Weekly that the show would be “as creative as possible,” given the constraints of a virtual ceremony. During the opening on Sunday, we found out exactly what that meant.

Kimmel kicked off the strange virtual ceremony, aka the Pandemmys, with an even stranger opening, doing jokes for what seemed like a full Emmys audience:

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, it was weird. But was it real?

Nah.

It wasn’t long before Kimmel revealed that his crowd was actually just old audience footage and that the Staples Center was mostly empty.

“Of course we don’t have an audience. This isn’t a MAGA rally, it’s the Emmys,” Kimmel said. 

The reveal was a surreal moment, as Kimmel showed that the seats were actually full of cardboard cutouts of the nominees. Well, they were mostly cardboard …

Kimmel then broke down how things would work: The ceremony would be using live feeds from more than 100 locations around the world to show the nominees. 

“You know how hard it is to get your parents to FaceTime? Multiply that by a lot,” Kimmel joked, before getting some hand sanitizer from an Emmy and showing a wall full of live feeds.

“This is a major undertaking. We have a hundred different feeds going all at once. What could possibly go right?”