Destiny Drives the Narrative in Emmy-Nominated Dramas

Questions of fate and fatalism unusually steer each of this year’s outstanding drama series Emmy nominees. In a category often dominated by staid, serious programs about staid, serious people, this crop of competing TV dramas all hinge on the ethereal concept of destiny, either literally or figuratively. Franchise prequels Andor, Better Call Saul and House of the Dragon enthrall audiences because, although we know what written-in-the-stars events these stories will eventually lead to, we don’t exactly know how they will lead to them — their endings will be the beginnings of cultural touchstones like Star Wars, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. And as in House of the Dragon, plotlines built around which characters will ultimately be anointed leader and/or savior also anchor fellow Emmy contenders The Last of Us and Succession. As for intrigue-driven dramas The White Lotus and Yellowjackets, capital-D Death remains a specter lurking in the shadows, with viewers constantly guessing who will inevitably meet the ghastliest ends. Even arguably the most temporal show of the batch, Succession, plays like a suspenseful and au courant Shakespearean tragedy.

The Emmy drama categories have historically reflected the most grounded shows on television: crime thrillers, business sagas, legal procedurals, kitchen-sink family melodramas, etc. Just 10 years ago, for example, the drama series race included Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, Homeland, House of Cards and Mad Men. Among this fairly sober grouping, only Game of Thrones threaded its politicking with supernatural elements.

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These days, “genre” programs in the fantasy, horror and sci-fi fields are not only mainstream, they’re downright prestigious — a shift that mirrors evolving tastes of the past decade as well as the ways TV production budgets have bloated as a consequence of the streaming wars.

What’s especially exciting about this year’s drama series nominees is that many showcase female characters — previously a shunted gender in these genres — wielding superstition as a way to leverage their own power and determine their own fortunes. Without employing a single actual witch, these nominees still somehow end up exuding a radical witchiness. Whether “magic” is real or not in the universes of shows like The Last of Us, House of the Dragon and Yellowjackets is immaterial to how their characters use mysticism to accrue authority and influence.

On HBO’s The Last of Us and House of the Dragon, explicitly supernatural settings stand in for our own complicated world, and prophecies are literalized around children seemingly born to deliver humankind from evil.

The former is set in a postapocalyptic America plagued by a pandemic that causes fungi to colonize people’s nervous systems and turn them into homicidal, zombie-like creatures. After the collapse of civilization, it’s up to a jaded smuggler (Pedro Pascal) to escort the only known immune person, an angry young teenager named Ellie (Bella Ramsey), across the continental U.S. so her biological gift can be harnessed to rebuild society. How’s that for destiny? No pressure! And the more Ellie both faces and exerts violence in her bid to endure the journey, the more she becomes subsumed in an existential crisis that forces her to question her will to live. Paradoxically, accepting that she might be key to humanity’s survival hardens her as she learns how to kill.

As Ellie subverts the damsel-in-distress trope by becoming a combat weapon in her own right, the women of House of the Dragon exercise power and shape their fates through back-channel whispers, marital alliances and sexual control. The warring Targaryen queens Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) believe their diverging lines of royal succession will lead to the foretold Prince That Was Promised, a future warrior who will save humanity from an impending darkness. Alicent, the righteous and scheming second wife of an ineffectual king (Paddy Considine), spends more than a decade chipping away at the legitimacy of her husband’s strong-willed heir, Rhaenyra, to promote her own children instead. The prophecy becomes the catalyst for a war of succession that pits sibling against sibling in a race to prove who among them is the true messiah.

Extraordinary bloodlines drive the plots of these fantastical shows, but magic doesn’t necessarily need to be tangible to operate as a storytelling device — it just needs to be believable enough to the characters asked to trust in its existence. On Showtime’s Yellowjackets, supernaturalism is used to manipulate and dominate others.

Yellowjackets is a horror mystery that never quite answers whether its spiritualism is based in fact or paranoia. Through dueling timelines, it depicts what happens to a high school girls’ soccer team that crash-lands in the untamed wilderness and must learn to survive a winter in barren woods. We watch as they suffer the gruesome consequences of living outside society’s structures, succumbing to cult rituals and cannibalism as they each start to believe in Lottie’s (Courtney Eaton) claim that an otherworldly entity in the woods is in control of who lives and dies. Lottie may or may not have a mental illness, but even decades after their rescue and return to normal life, the women still maintain a link to the worship of their youth, allowing Lottie’s charisma to sweep them into mystical frenzy and commit one last act of murder.

Exploring a more modern, you-are-your-choices sense of destiny, HBO’s The White Lotus veers away in its second season from the class comedy of its initial outing and leans into the dark allure of its Sicilian setting. We learn in the first few moments that the season will conclude with another dead body, and throughout the seven episodes it’s foreshadowed that fan favorite ditz Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) will be involved. She’s ultimately drawn into the sensorial world of a genteel con artist (Tom Hollander) who tantalizes her with gloomy Sicilian lore, art and opera, which only stimulates an uncanny fear of her own doom. Tanya eventually realizes the aristocrat is plotting to kill her for her fortune and takes her fate into her own hands, using a found gun to kill her would-be assassins and save herself — only to accidentally fall into the sea and drown in the process. The irony of Tanya’s end only deepens its poignant mystique. By assuming control of her destiny, she directly, if inadvertently, causes her own demise.

Questions of who will live, die and rule are fundamental to many great stories, but this year’s dramas add a touch of magic — literal or not.

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

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