Critic’s Notebook: What Will Get Lost in TV’s Pre-Emmy Onslaught?
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Old TV Awards Season Conventional Wisdom: The three-month onslaught of campaigning and promotion between the close of the Emmy eligibility window on May 31 and the actual awards in September can make it very difficult for even the best summer premieres to find traction nearly a year later. Won’t somebody please take pity on The White Lotus and Reservation Dogs!
New TV Awards Season Conventional Wisdom: The race to sneak last-minute premieres in by the May 31 eligibility deadline can make it very difficult for shows that premiered two weeks ago to find traction. Won’t somebody please take pity on … ummm … that prestige streaming literary adaptation or … ummm … that movie star’s desperate-looking attempt to check off another EGOT box!
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Since pundits have been calling TV the new movies for years — cinema wishes it was as active and popularly relevant, but that’s a different column — this was inevitable. The end-of-December Oscar eligibility release glut has been a tradition for decades, one that causes countless presumptive contenders to slip through the cracks for various reasons, sometimes relating to quality, sometimes to studio clout and sometimes to the whimsies of caprice.
Now, TV is about to get into that business as April and May have seen a weekly avalanche of programming, much of it clearly intended for Emmy consideration, with some weekends seeing 10 or 15 new shows, only a third of which are based on podcasts or documentaries related to fraud or true crime. It’s a cacophony that will lead to internecine cannibalism and general chaos that benefits absolutely nobody. It’s representative of the marketplace that suddenly shows from June or July are as likely to be forgotten as shows that premiered last week.
You can never go wrong blaming the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, at least partially. Through ethical squishiness and an entrenched institutional lack of diversity, the HFPA rendered itself and the Golden Globes irrelevant this year — whether they should ever have been relevant, given their track record, is yet another different column — and, in the process, negated a midseason awards signpost that doesn’t exist for film. Folks could release shows in November and early December and use “Golden Globe winner!” as a hook for months of additional attention. With the Globes a shriveled remnant of themselves, the SAG Awards perplexingly slow to fully embrace television and the Critics Choice Awards … the Critics Choice Awards, there was no reason for anybody to rush a premiere into the fourth quarter of 2021.
The split-season phenomenon is also a growing culprit. Splitting seasons isn’t new. Breaking Bad, Mad Men and The Sopranos got bonus Emmy runs because of their split concluding seasons, but what shows like Better Call Saul and Stranger Things are doing is different. Yes, there are other plausible reasons for their splits — myriad production delays, complicated effects, etc. — but both shows have half-seasons ducking in under the wire for the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards and then the second halves will come out in a matter of weeks and will be eligible for next year.
There’s a risk that some fragile and terrific little shows are going to get forgotten, whether I go back as far as FX’s Reservation Dogs or to early 2022 offerings like Amazon’s As We See It or HBO’s Somebody Somewhere, critical favorites that will require nurturing and aggressive drum-banging to remain visible.
There’s a risk that some mid-level series of variable merit are going to get forgotten. Hulu’s Life & Beth has the stars of Trainwreck and Superbad, and it’s a surprisingly moving and funny show — and nobody’s talking about it anymore. Also at Hulu, it seems like Jessica Biel and Melanie Lynskey weren’t enough to separate Candy from the, “Man, can you believe how crazy that murder case was?” swamp. Apple TV+ has had an amazing spring of originals, but even if you assume Pachinko and Severance might have enough passionate devotees to remain in any conversation about the best things on TV, will stars with Oscars and Emmys be enough to make anybody cast a ballot for Gary Oldman’s Slow Horses and Elisabeth Moss’ Shining Girls?
Having a movie star front and center on your poster used to be exactly the sort of thing that impressed Emmy voters. I feel confident that Colin Firth and HBO Max’s The Staircase will be major players and that Julia Roberts and a latex-encased Sean Penn will have Starz’s Gaslit on some radars, but who’s going to remember that Nicole Kidman and Apple TV+’s Roar were things that existed?
And it isn’t just new stuff. Some of the best shows on TV have returned in the past couple of months, some from multiyear absences, and there just isn’t going to be room for them all to be in the mix on Emmy night. I’m not worried about Atlanta or Barry or Better Call Saul, though whether this will be the year Emmy voters finally notice Rhea Seehorn always worries me. But who’s going to stick up for Better Things, which had a beautiful final season and will represent a mark of TV Academy shame if Pamela Adlon is never nominated for directing?
I have a sinking sensation that some networks and streamers are about to pay a price for piling everything up to launch by May 31. I only hope my favorites aren’t among the casualties.
This story first appeared in the May 25 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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