This year’s Emmy nominations presented an opportunity for voters, freed from the velvet shackles of Succession and Ted Lasso and Better Call Saul and Barry and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, among other legacy juggernauts.
Other than a very few returning favorites — Abbott Elementary, Only Murders in the Building, The Crown, The Bear — there were enough vacated slots for the Academy to reshape the field in whatever image they desired.
Announced on Wednesday (July 17) morning, then, the nominations for the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards represented a fairly predictable mixed bag: A few long-term wrongs were righted, some ongoing slights were maintained and the pervasive chaos of the Emmys categorization system rewarded some questionable classification choices and punished others.
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Let’s start from a place of positivity.
Reservation Dogs led my Top 10 lists each of the past two years and, over its three seasons, cemented a place as one of the very best shows ever made. And in its first two stabs at Emmy notice, it came away nearly empty-handed.
Not this year. Sterlin Harjo’s triumph of Indigenous representation and empathetic and frequently hilarious regional storytelling picked up its very first (and last, I suppose) outstanding comedy series nomination. If I could just stop writing here, it would be a happy morning.
It wasn’t just one nomination, though. Mark Schwartzbard was nominated for the cinematography on “Deer Lady,” a potent and disturbing reflection on the crimes perpetrated at Native boarding schools, while editors Patrick Tuck and Varun Viswanath were recognized for “Dig,” the joyous series finale. Best of all, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai received his first nomination for lead actor in a comedy, honoring his character’s complicated maturation arc across 28 episodes.
Sorry, but I’m incapable of just being happy, mind you. My fear was that the Emmy voters would ignore all of the show’s Indigenous contributors and exclusively nominate Ethan Hawke for the spectacular “Elora’s Dad” episode. And that didn’t happen! But I still wanted Hawke nominated for that beautifully layered guest performance, which was opposite Devery Jacobs’ equally worthy turn. And Jacobs should have been nominated for the writing of that episode; ditto Sterlin Harjo for directing.
Of all the Reservation Dogs slights, I would say the failure of Emmy voters to honor the show’s casting is the most egregious. Tapping into a Native pool that Hollywood had been ignoring since the decades of casting white actors in red-face in classic Westerns, Reservation Dogs filled a deep ensemble with both new and familiar actors — and then, just to prove it was possible, turned around and redid the entire cast for a flashback episode set in 1976.
Conventional wisdom has always been that once Emmy voters miss you the first time around, it’s hard to suddenly pop back on their radar for later seasons — an entrenchment that runs counter to TV shows ideally evolving and improving as they go along.
This year, though, voters had to dig deep, and in that digging, thankfully found Reservation Dogs and some other amusing things.
Slow Horses, previously shut out despite Gary Oldman’s delightfully flatulent lead performance, not-so-suddenly found itself an Emmy favorite with nine nominations including drama series, Oldman as lead actor, Jack Lowden as supporting actor and nominations for writing and directing. The third season of Slow Horses was my favorite to date, and I understand why the first two seasons, more “good” than “great,” didn’t quite break through. But I’d add that Saskia Reeves, Rosalind Eleazar and Kristin Scott Thomas were all every bit as worthy as Lowden.
Making a similar leap through the vacuum was HBO’s The Gilded Age, as Julian Fellowes’ petri dish of 19th-century class resentment and Tony-winning actors became a drama series nominee and Carrie Coon and Christine Baranski landed in the lead and supporting actress fields, respectively. Like Slow Horses, The Gilded Age chose the right time to make a tiny jump in quality.
Other previously ignored actors who capitalized on all the vacant real estate included Selena Gomez, finally joining Only Murders co-stars Martin Short and Steve Martin; Maya Rudolph, after being left out for the first season of Loot; and Matt Berry, the first breakthrough for a cast member from FX’s What We Do in the Shadows.
Just because voters made room for some fresh faces doesn’t mean that they didn’t fall back on the usual, familiar complacency. The Crown picked up 18 nominations for a final season that was — let’s be generous here — something of a mixed bag, as voters did such reliably silly things as nominating Claire Foy for a negligible returning cameo, nominating Lesley Manville for supporting in a season in which she basically had dialogue in one episode, and putting Dominic West in the lead actor category. That, if nothing else, will finally pit McNulty against Stringer Bell (Idris Elba up for Hijack) for an Emmy. West was fine in The Crown, but darned if I’m going to shut up about how criminal the snubbing of Dark Winds star Zahn McClarnon is.
One of the big stories leading up to the nominations focused on how ridiculously some shows were stretching the boundaries of their respective genre classifications. Looking at the results, though, almost nobody was punished for their category placement.
Confusion at its status as a “comedy” and ambivalence toward the freshly released third season didn’t stop The Bear from dominating with 23 nominations for a second season that launched over a year ago. I was especially pleased to see Lionel Boyce break into the supporting actor field, while I was slightly perplexed (not displeased, mind you) to see Liza Colon-Zayas make the cut for a second season in which Tina was largely secondary (in contrast to the third season, in which she has one remarkable showcase episode).
FX, which had a generally spectacular morning, also rolled the dice and won by announcing the development of a second Shōgun season, which moved the James Clavell adaptation out of the crowded limited/miniseries field — Fargo, with a 15-nomination comeback, was a likely beneficiary — and into drama; it picked up 25 nominations. I was glad the Shōgun momentum extended to nominations for Tadanobu Asano and Takehiro Hira, though leaving out the series’ supporting actresses was a glaring mistake. I mean… four nominations for The Morning Show in that category? Gratuitous. But Apple TV+ had a great morning — 11 nominations for the tonal mess that was Palm Royale — as well.
As did Amazon! Fallout got technical nominations aplenty, plus drama series and a very funny, very worthy nomination for Walton Goggins as lead actor. (It’s not funny for Walton Goggins to get recognition for stuff. It’s funny for him to get recognition for a role in which he spends most of the show looking like a suppurating red skull. If asked to nominate one Walton Goggins Amazon series, I’d still have gone with I’m a Virgo.)
A bigger surprise was how well the choice to call Mr. & Mrs. Smith a drama went. We still don’t know if the second season will feature a largely new cast, thereby maybe making it an anthology, and I personally would have called it a “comedy.” But given its 16 nominations — including drama series, a bunch of guest actors and stars Donald Glover and Maya Erskine — I’ll acknowledge that Amazon made a successful decision.
The same cannot be said for Showtime deeming The Curse a drama. The satire of white privilege, liberal guilt and reality TV was probably too off-putting for voters anyway, but whatever it is, it’s not a drama. Emma Stone in particular paid the price as The Curse was entirely shut out. Would it have broken through in the limited category? Probably not, especially given how strong the affection for Apple’s Lessons in Chemistry turned out to be.
That category was so tough that powerhouse HBO was only able to get single nominations for both The Regime and The Sympathizer. On the latter, voters fell into the trap I feared with Hawke and Reservation Dogs, tapping scenery-chewing Robert Downey Jr. and leaving out series star Hoa Xuande and the rest of the largely Asian cast.
Let’s end on a positive note: Skimming the rest of the nominations, I take particular pleasure in Robert Elswit’s salute for the eye-popping Ripley cinematography (Maurizio Lombardi’s snub for supporting actor rankles, though); the Blue Eye Samurai nomination for animated program; and Lamorne Morris’ placement for Fargo (though Sam Spruell should have been there as well). Congrats, all!
