Neil Patrick Harris is trying his best to smooth over the first (but probably not the last) controversy to crop up over this year Emmy awards.

As a way to speed things along a little better, producers of this year's telecast on CBS decided to hand out writing awards ahead of the ceremony, and then provide edited versions of those awards in the live broadcast.

The actor, who stars in the CBS comedy "How I Met Your Mother," told The Los Angeles Times that nothing important is going to be edited out -- most especially the speeches.

"It's not like they're happening on a different evening, and they're all just going to be montaged together," Harris said. "We're just trying to edit down the standing and the hugging and the walking down the aisle. Quite frankly, the writers' speeches are some of the best ones of the night. So we'll be able to highlight them more than anything. There's just some boring parts of that that we're just trying to trim down."

CBS president Nina Tassler said a lot of the slow moving was hurting the ratings.

"Coming out of the telecast last year, everybody in the business knew we had to make a change," Tassler told The New York Times. "It will have no impact on the integrity of the program. This is about creating and producing an exciting and entertaining program. If the ratings are up, more people are going to be watching the new shows."

The network has yet to disclose exactly which categories are going to be chopped up, but Tassler said that every division of award would be represented in the cuts, and not just writers.

Even John Schaffner, the president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, tried to quell some of the growing concern over the change.

"Not only do they get to go up onstage and win, then later in the evening, they can sit in the audience and watch themselves win again," he said.

Chicago Tribune television writer Maureen Ryan was not impressed, saying the move to trim down speeches so that CBS can showcase higher-rated series -- including some that aren't even nominated -- was "wrong."

"We're not snobs, but we sure don't like being told, in so many words -- and by a representative of an awards-giving body -- that quality shouldn't matter quite so much," Ryan wrote. "The fact is, if the Emmy people were worried that viewers wouldn't know about or care about those eight categories, why didn't they have the courage of their convictions and just exile those categories to the technical awards ceremony?"

In any event, the Emmys will be broadcasted mostly live Sept. 20 on CBS.