With Emmy Voting About to Begin, Can We Please Get a Few Surprises?

We know that shocks tend to be few and far between, but here’s hoping for a little variety and less category-hogging

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With Emmy voting beginning in two days and running through June 23, it’s time to once again confront that old Television Academy truth: Emmy voters are creatures of habit.

While the Oscars have revamped their membership over the past decade, bringing in more international voters and producing a string of Best Picture nominees and winners that once would have been unthinkable, the Television Academy has adapted to the changing TV landscape by remaining largely predictable.

Yes, it’s progress that voters embraced the predominantly Japanese-language series “Shōgun” last year, but nobody was really surprised when that happened.  Like an aircraft carrier, the Television Academy is huge — more than 26,000 members — and it doesn’t turn easily.

Still, one can hope for some changes this year. On the eve of voting, here’s my modest wish list for the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards.

Pleasant surprises of any kind

We know that shocks tend to be few and far between when Emmy nominations are announced. But there have been some satisfying (if mild) ones in the drama categories of late: “Slow Horses” breaking through in its third season last year, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” sneaking in for its first season and “The Boys” proving that Emmy voters can actually find room for superheroes.

The good news this year is that only one of last year’s Outstanding Drama Series nominees, “Slow Horses,” is eligible again, so voters will have to look elsewhere. The bad news is that a lot of past nominees are returning to the race, so the slate could still be filled with shows that have been here before.

The consensus favorites going into nominations seem to be previous nominees “Andor,” “The Last of Us,” “Severance,” “Slow Horses” and “The White Lotus”; new show “The Pitt”; second-year program “The Diplomat”; and three additional series from which the eighth and final nominee will be chosen, “Paradise” (new), “Squid Game” (past nominee) and “The Handmaid’s Tale” (past winner).  You can get a strong lineup from that list, but even a couple of minor upsets would help. 

In the Outstanding Comedy Series, meanwhile, four past nominees (“Hacks” and “The Bear,” which have won, and “Only Murders in the Building” and “Abbott Elementary,” which have three noms each but no wins) seem assured of repeat nominations, while “What We Do in the Shadows” could easily land its fourth nod as well. (“Cobra Kai” seems less likely to receive its second nom four years after it got its first, but who knows?)

Along with the returning nominees, there are plenty of fresh challengers, from first-year contenders “The Studio,” “Nobody Wants This,” “A Man on the Inside,” “The Four Seasons” and “Agatha All Along” to the second season of “Shrinking” and the fourth and final season of “The Righteous Gemstones.”  So surprises at least seem possible.

An impressive showing by broadcast networks

The broadcast networks dominated the program categories for decades, but that was a long time ago. While the last decade has seen one or two broadcast shows nominated in the top comedy category every year except one, the drama category has been dominated by streamers and cable.

 Over the past 10 years, Netflix and HBO have scored almost half of all Outstanding Drama Series nominees (48.7%, to be precise), while NBC’s “This Is Us” has been the only broadcast drama series to be nominated in the category. Looking over last year’s results in every category, about 140 nominations went to drama series. Only two of those, both for stunt coordination, were for broadcast shows.

 It’s probably fruitless to count on another broadcast series crashing the top category this year, although “Matlock” stans can dream. But it’d be nice if the networks that have given us acting contenders from “Matlock,” “Elsbeth,” “High Potential,” “Will Trent” and others could get a little love from voters this time around. For old time’s sake, maybe?

A somewhat wacky mixture in the TV-movie category

In recent years, the Outstanding Television Movie category gets my vote as the weirdest major Emmy category. It’s the category where a silly movie about Pop-Tarts can go up against a tense drama about sexual assault, where a sequel to “Predator” is nominated alongside a sequel to “Hocus Pocus,” where movies that were made for the big screen can end up winning awards for TV, as long as they can get past Dolly Parton’s latest Christmas flick.

The last five years of the category have seen a bewildering variety of nominees that includes broad comedies (“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” “Quiz Lady” and Jerry Seinfeld’s “Unfrosted”), movies that went to film festivals but ended up on TV (“The Survivor,” “Uncle Frank”), adaptations of plays (“American Son,” “Oslo”), sequels to hit films (“Prey,” “Hocus Pocus”), more Dolly Parton (“Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings: These Old Bones,” “Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas”) and a lot of TV series spinoffs (“Ray Donovan: The Movie,” “Reno 911! The Hunt for QAnon,” “Zoey’s Extraordinary Christmas,” “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie,” “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs the Reverend”).

This year’s field includes the usual potpourri, including “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,” the small-town crime film “Rebel Ridge,” the first-ever “Star Trek” TV movie, some horror and a lot of other stuff. And is it any surprise that in early April, HBO rocked the category by revealing that the Emmy-winning creator of “Succession,” Jesse Armstrong, was going to qualify in the category this year for the film “Mountainhead,” which hadn’t even finished shooting at the time it was announced?

So all I ask is that in the weirdest category, we get a slate of nominees that are at least a little weird.

Actors from more than five programs in the supporting acting categories

This has been a problem in the Emmys’ acting categories for the past few years, which I’ve written about many times in this space. As the amount of television content has exploded, voters have increasingly turned to heaping acting nominations on a small number of shows, with the supporting drama categories a particular focus for category-hogging. 

Last year, the 14 supporting drana nominations went to only five shows: seven for “The Morning Show,” three for “The Crown,” two for “Shōgun” and one each for “Slow Horses” and “The Gilded Age.” The year before, the 16 nominations went to only four shows: “The White Lotus” got nine, “Succession” got five and “The Crown” and “Better Call Saul” got one each. In the supporting comedy categories, things were marginally better, with six shows splitting 12 nominations last year and seven shows claiming the 14 noms the year before.

Given the potential dominance of “The White Lotus”in drama this year, I’d guess that if anybody was taking odds on the number of different shows represented in the category, the over/under would land somewhere around 5.5. In the comedy categories, the presence of possible multiple nominees from “Abbott Elementary,” “The Studio,” “Shrinking,” “Hacks” and “The Bear” wouldn’t make that number much higher. I wouldn’t necessarily bet on the over, but I’m certainly wishing for it.

Is that too much to ask? Check back on July 15

A version of this story will appear in the Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

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