EMMY NODS LEAN TO STREAMERS
Nominations actually reflect some of this year's best TV, writes Inkoo Kang.
Stacey Abrams, Regé-Jean Page of Bridgerton and no less than six cast members of Ted Lasso became first-time Emmy nominees on Tuesday. The 2021 contenders of TV's most prestigious awards tilted away this year from broadcast programming and even cable offerings in favour of streamer tent poles.
Abrams, the voting rights activist and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, received a nomination for her guest turn on ABC's Black-ish. But six of the seven shows with the most nods were marquee titles on streaming platforms — The Crown (Netflix), The Mandalorian (Disney Plus), WandaVision (Disney+), The Handmaid's Tale (Hulu),
Ted Lasso (Apple TV+) and The Queen's Gambit (Netflix) — with Saturday Night Live (NBC) the lone exception.
The Emmys — to air Sept. 19 on CBS — aren't exactly a reliable barometer for excellence, with too many smaller shows, like P-Valley and Philly D.A., falling through the cracks. The best case for the awards in 2021, when the TV landscape has been irreparably fragmented not just by demographics but by subscriber base, is that it helps solidify a reigning canon of water-cooler shows. And if the goal is to help TV become a community-building medium again, the 2021 slate of nominations are more than sufficient, collecting the highlights of the past year on TV and reflecting how scattered they are across various channels and services.
The once-stodgy Television Academy, which votes on the Emmys, continued its recent trend of recognizing new hits and zeitgeist-capturing programming. Whereas breakout series once had to wait until their second seasons for the Emmys to take notice, first-season shows like
Ted Lasso, Bridgerton and Hacks had no trouble distinguishing themselves this year. Other pop-cultural shows the Emmys heeded: Hamilton (Disney+), Bo Burnham: Inside (Netflix), Oprah With Harry and Meghan (CBS) and the Friends reunion (Crave in Canada).
Game of Thrones may have left behind a permanent change to the Emmys' drama category. Based on this year's nominees, at least, science fiction and fantasy seem to have shed entirely the longtime perception of being lesser genres. Four rather different sci-fi shows made the cut this year: the superhero dystopia The Boys (Amazon Prime), the feminist nightmare The Handmaid's Tale, the Star Wars space western The Mandalorian and the race-conscious road-trip series Lovecraft Country (HBO). The rest of the drama nods went to period pieces: the Austen-on-steroids Bridgerton, the time-hopping weepie This Is Us (NBC), the Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher chapter of The Crown and the recently concluded final season of Pose (FX), which racked up nods for its stars Billy Porter and Mj Rodriguez, the first lead trans actress to nab an Emmy nod.
In recent years, category fraud and wildly disparate tastes in humour have made the Emmys comedy race a site of unchecked chaos. This year is no different, with a network stalwart like Black-ish going head to head against new favourites like the Karate Kid sequel Cobra
Kai (Netflix) and the American-in-England soccer comedy Ted Lasso, as well as niche critical darlings like the standup dramedy Hacks (HBO Max) and the puberty cringefest PEN15 (Hulu).
I still don't know a single soul who watches the Michael
Douglas headliner The Kominsky Method, nor anyone who unironically binged the blandly aspirational yet scandal-plagued Emily in Paris. Yet both were nominated alongside the extremely fun (and extremely not a comedy) murder mystery The Flight Attendant (HBO Max).
The late-night category became all-male once again, with Conan supplanting Full Frontal With Samantha Bee in the talk-show race alongside Jimmy Kimmel
Live, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show With Trevor Noah. Notably, the two high-profile female-centric entrants into the late night world, Ziwe and The Amber Ruffin Show, chose to compete in the variety sketch series category, which only anointed two nominees anyway: Saturday Night Live and the frequently hilarious but fatally outmatched A Black Lady Sketch Show (HBO).