‘Schitt’s Creek’ & ‘The Good Place’ End With An Emmy Nomination Bang While Others Finish Quietly

Peter White
·4 min read

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Last year, Game of Thrones ended in awards style with its final season securing 32 nomination and the HBO fantasy drama winning the Emmy for Best Drama Series.

There won’t be any comparable achievement on the drama side this year, but the teams behind Schitt’s Creek and The Good Place will be crossing their fingers that their comedies can end in similar style as they racked up more than 20 nominations between them this morning.

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The NBC comedy and Pop TV’s CBC co-production will go head-to-head in the Best Comedy category for their final seasons with a multitude of nominations for cast as well.

BoJack Horseman will also be hoping that the washed-up ’90s anthropomorphic horse can trot off in style with a win in the Outstanding Animated Program category. The Netflix cartoon ended its six-season run in January.

However, a number of other long-running series that have come to an end are going out rather quieter.

Modern Family, Homeland, How to Get Away With Murder, Empire, Will & Grace (for the second time), Ray Donovan, The Affair and Silicon Valley only received eight nominations between them, largely in the crew categories.

Schitt’s Creek has the best chance to go out with a bang, picking up 15 nominations. Stars Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara were both nommed in the lead comedy categories, while Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy (her first) made it into supporting categories. A smart choice given you could argue that the show actually has four leads. It is also in the Outstanding Comedy Series category as well as a plethora of behind-the-scenes nominations.

Daniel and Eugene Levy, who created the series, said this morning had been the “most incredible surprise.” “We are overwhelmed and filled with gratitude for this recognition. Unfathomably proud of our little show,” they said.

Meanwhile, The Good Place remains the standard bearer for broadcast network television, which hit an Emmy nominations low with 121 nods this year, alongside Black-ish, which scored a couple of acting noms for stars Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross.

The Mike Schur-created Good Place scored six nominations including for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series as well as nods for Ted Danson, D’Arcy Carden in the supporting actress in a comedy category, William Jackson Harper in the equivalent actor category, and a guest turn from Maya Rudolph. This beat its total from 2019 of five nominations.

There was some hope that ABC’s Modern Family would go out with Emmy buzz. The series ended after 11 seasons and 250 episodes in April. Fred Willard, who played Phil Dunphy’s father Frank, scored a posthumous nomination for Guest Actor in a Comedy, while Gail Mancuso secured a nomination for directing the second part of the finale. There was, unfortunately, no nod in the Outstanding Comedy Series category for the show, which won the award five times in a row.

Similarly, former Showtime Emmy darling Homeland, which won best drama series in 2012 and nominated four times across its eight seasons, was not able to find much voter love this time around. It did, however, pick up one nomination for director Lesli Linka Glatter.

There was little Emmy recognition for ABC’s How to Get Away With Murder, which ended earlier this year after six seasons. This was after the fact that Viola Davis became the first Black woman to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2015. The Shonda Rhimes-produced series’ only nod was for guest star Cicely Tyson playing the show’s Ophelia Harkness.

NBC’s Will & Grace ended for a second time with three behind-the-scenes noms, including in Outstanding Directing For A Comedy Series for James Burrows’ helming of its “We Love Lucy” episode.

Fox’s Empire, which ended in somewhat controversial fashion, couldn’t get on the Emmy scoresheet, as couldn’t Showtime’s Ray Donovan, which was abruptly canceled earlier this year. Showtime’s The Affair, which surprisingly was never much of an Emmy favorite, couldn’t muster any nods for its final season, with the same true for ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat.

Netflix’s Ashton Kutcher-fronted multi-camera The Ranch has taken two nods after ending in January, while HBO’s Silicon Valley, nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series in 2018, could only find one crew nod.

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