FYC: Amy Schumer for Best Actress, Comedy

Members of Team Experience were asked to share personal dream picks for this year's impending Emmy nominations. Here's Jose...

Amy Schumer often gets credit for her ingenious writing, larger than life personality and her lack of fear when it comes to addressing controversial topics like the media’s obsession with youth, the importance of the female orgasm and Bill Cosby. However, like most stand up comedians, she rarely is commended for her acting on the assumption that she’s playing herself. And yet, in just a handful of episodes during the third season of "Inside Amy Schumer "she has played everything from clueless spouses, to child beauty queens and even a black & white heroine.

She was recently rewarded with the Critics Choice Award for Best Actress in a Comedy, and if the Emmys dare to break out of their rut of picking perennial faves, they would do much good including her in a lineup with more established actresses:  her timing is as flawless as Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ Selina Meyer, her lack of vanity is akin to Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish, and her idealism (while slightly more infused with cynicism) makes her as strong a role model as Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope. For someone who’s always playing self conscious characters, it’s astonishing to see how self aware and controlled Schumer can be as a performer. And unless she has multiple personality disorder, she's not just playing herself.

FYC: "Jane the Virgin" For Best Comedy Series

Team Experience shares their preferred picks in top Emmy categories as voters ready their ballots. Here's Denny...

Jane the Virgin shouldn't work. But it does, in every way, in every episode. Based on a Venezuelan telenovela, the show tells the story of Jane (luminous Golden Globe winner Gina Rodriguez), a straight-A college student working at a posh Miami hotel as she completes her degree in Education, who gets accidentally artificially inseminated.

Showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman pulled off a miracle with Jane's first season. There is not a single bad episode. NOT. ONE. And that feat is even more impressive when you consider what a high-wire act each episode of Jane is: Each episode juggles an ever-expanding cast of major characters, multiple flashbacks, in-show telenovelas, fantasy and/or dream sequences, one character (Jane's abuela Alba) who speaks exclusively in subtitled Spanish, and a third-person omniscent narrator who has become a character in his own right.

Oh yeah, and onscreen text, including the only onscreen twitter hashtags that are not only usable but laugh-loud funny. AND real-world issues that surround the show's beautifully-written Latina/o characters

All of this may sound like too much, but somehow it isn't. There's a lightness of touch here missing from most TV comedies - heck, most TV shows PERIOD. The show is able to earn copious amounts of tears while still remaining one of the funniest shows on TV, thanks in equal part to the remarkably assured writing, the tremendous performances (#emmyforrogelio), and the smart direction on display.

While it's true that Emmy hasn't noticed anything on The CW before, honoring Jane the Virgin with a nomination for Best Comedy Series would not only add diversity to the usually lily-white category, it would add credibility. It would show that Emmy voters not only care about quality, but that they don't care where they find it.

P.S. Two brilliant FYC ads if you haven't seen them after the jump...

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Rose Byrne in "Spy"

Let's make this happen universe.

Or we'll all be as sad as Bulgarian clowns. 

FYC: Lisa Kudrow for Best Lead Actress in a Comedy

Team Experience sharing their personal Emmy dream picks every day at Noon. Here's Manuel on Lisa Kudrow...

For anyone who watched the criminally underseen first season of Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback, you know how the former Phoebe Buffay created a portrait of an actress so intent on controlling her image and reclaiming her sitcom career that the dark humor and awkwardness of it all was perhaps too much to bear. If the first season was an excruciating exercise in reality TV satire, the second season was an indictment of Hollywood sexism that used the show’s meta structure (Valerie gets cast as the thinly veiled version of herself in an HBO show about the very show she starred in The Comeback’s first season) to force us to yes, laugh at Valerie’s seeming cluelessness but also to examine why and how those laughs are being elicited. There’s humor in Valerie quite literally living out the demented humiliations that a former writer thrusts upon her as part of making his HBO show “edgy” but with every laugh at Valerie (in a trunk full of snakes, standing awkwardly next to two naked women, going down on Seth Rogen) there was a performance that asked you to empathize with this yes, self-deluded character.

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Grace & Frankie. Final Thoughts & Emmy Wishes

We recapped the first half of Grace and Frankie and then abruptly quit talking about it, but since it's been renewed, we should tie this up in a neat bow. As with other Netflix shows in the past like OITNB and Daredevil it didn't quite engage people in the blogging model as weekly series coverage does despite the fact that it was clear that most readers were watching. The problem, as documented in ongoing media hand-wringing and cultural conversations about binge-watching, is that nobody's ever on the same page. 

But on the other hand people do seem to have ended up on (mostly) the same page with Grace & Frankie in terms of its overall quality. More...

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