Emmy FYC ~ Supporting Actresses

by Nathaniel R

Parker Posey in "The Staircase", Natasha Rothwell in "The White Lotus", Sydney Sweeney in "Euphoria", and Sheryl Lee Ralph in "Abbott Elementary"

Have you ever actually gazed at those gargantuan Emmy ballots?  No matter how much TV you're watching you will know, looking at the options, that you won't be able to give every acclaimed performance a fair shake. Some shows you may not have even heard of. This is why Emmys definitely need rounds of voting or juries or some winnowing process to help voters (and by extension the public) to discover great work beyond just listing all the names from the shows they do watch each year, whether or not the actor had a good season. Imagine the Oscars if there weren't all those critics awards all over the place, multiple precursors, and top ten lists and the like pointing people to performances and the result was regulary 3-5 actors from 2-3 films taking up most of the 20 slots.

We know that that happens consistently at the Emmys. For example, just last year The Handmaid's Tale filled literally half the ballot in Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and three years back Game of Thrones made up  more than half of the nominated shortlist...

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Emmy Ballot Reactions

By Abe Friedtanzer

John Cena in Peacemaker

Emmy ballots are here now that voting is officially open, and it’s a lot to process. I hastily flipped through nearly 400 pages of submitted performers while running between Tribeca screenings and made some notes about placements that seemed noteworthy. Some of them may have been announced before or expected, but still pique the interest. Please add your own in the comments since I'm sure we all watch different shows. I didn’t take the time to count the number of performers submitted in each category, but fortunatelyGoldDerby always does a great job of that. The short of it is that every single acting category is way up in submissions, though the typically largest category, Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, only has 434, which is not as high as the 455 from 2020. Here are some observations…

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Emmys: Will Returning Shows Dominate Drama & Comedy Categories?

By Christopher James

Can both of last year's Emmy winners prevail in much more competitive conditions?

When it comes to the Emmys, voters tend to stick with what they know. Once a show gets nominated for Outstanding Series, it will forever be on the Emmys radar and a threat to repeat its nomination. Yes, some shows drop off but prevailing wisdom says that, when filling out a prediction sheet for the Emmys, always start with what was nominated previously before adding in new shows.

However this year that may prove to be a somewhat difficult predictive approach. Due to the pandemic, some shows were not eligible each of the past two years, forcing the Emmys to choose new favourites to nominate. Now, most of their former favourites have aired new seasons, including some programs that had laid dormant for many seasons. What we have, then, is a returning show bottleneck...

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FYC: The Network Sitcom Makes a Comeback

By Christopher James

ABC's breakout hit "Abbott Elementary" isn't the only network success this season.

When was the last time anxiously awaited new weekly episodes of a network TV comedy? It’s been nearly a generation since comedies like Roseanne, Friends and Seinfeld ruled the airways. It’s even been a decade since critical darlings like The Office, 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation amassed their devout followings. Ratings for network TV comedies have continued to dwindle while critics and the Television Academy lost interest. In the past 10 years, only five shows have been nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series at the Emmys: 30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, black-ish and The Good Place. In short, the writing was on the wall that the network sitcom was dead.

Everybody loves a comeback, though...

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The First Lady, Ep. 1 - 'That White House'

by Eric Blume

Showtime's limited series The First Lady kicked off its premiere episode last week. It's a bit of a mixed bag out of the gate. The episode consists of several 10-minute-ish scenes covering each of our protagonists:  Michelle Obama (Viola Davis); Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer); and Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson).  A ticker on the bottom of the screen whisks us backward and forward between these women whose stories are about forty years apart from each other. 

There's not a great deal of grace in this back-and-forth execution, feeding us small glimpses of each lady in semi-satisfying increments that don't seem to have a meaningful connection between them outside of generic "I'm my own person" theme.  It's probably easiest to tackle these three stories independently, because episode one doesn't give us much of a linking thread or powerful throughline yet, and because there are pleasures to be had within the confines of this awkward setup...

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