The Emmys Need To Get Out Of Their Own Way
This year’s Emmy nominations are out, and as you might expect, I’ve got thoughts.
1. The Bear Conundrum. Hulu’s The Bear earned a record 23 nominations, the most ever for a comedy. The problem, if you’ve never seen the show, is that The Bear isn’t funny. That’s on purpose—it’s not supposed to be funny. It’s a half hour (give or take) drama, and under the Academy’s bizarre rules, that means it qualifies for the Comedy category, not Drama. Because comedies, back in days of yore, were 30 minutes and dramas were 60 minutes and the Academy has not seen fit to alter that.
So it will be interesting to see if voters, who were happy to reward The Bear last year—it’s an excellent series—will do so this year at the expense of shows that are, you know, actually funny.
Odder still is the Supporting Actor category, where two actors from The Bear are up against SNL’s Bowen Yang, SNL being a 90-minute sketch comedy show.
I can’t actually think of a rational reason why the Academy doesn’t change the rules—it’s not as if streaming is going away or The Bear was some sort of dramedy or that this was a one-time blip.
Mostly, it seems unfair to everyone involved. If you are giving out awards for comedies, comic writing and comic acting, then the nominees should all fall into that broad category. It’s not fair to anyone and, more than that, it’s going to simultaneously confuse and piss off all the viewers who are already getting tired of award shows.
Though I suspect it will give the show’s host a slew of ready-made jokes. So there’s that.
2. The “Limited Series” Conundrum: Shogun, Hulu’s hit series, was a limited series last year. This year it’s a drama. It’s unclear why (other than some clever strategizing by the team at Hulu). The distinction between the two categories has become increasingly blurry, especially as streaming services tend not to release their series on any sort of regular schedule and because many of them (White Lotus) are more anthologies than series with a complete storyline.
Here again, the real risk seems to be making the Emmys irrelevant to the folks at home who are not going to understand the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin distinctions between the various categories and will largely serve to annoy and confuse them.
3. The “FX” and “Hulu” Conundrum. The business relationship between FX and Hulu is fairly complicated, but given that FX series run on Hulu, it’s not clear why either party thinks there is value in continuing to make that distinction a public-facing one. The aforementioned The Bear and Shogun, two FX series that run on Hulu, both won record numbers of nominations this year. And yet some publications are listing those shows as belonging to “Hulu” in their reporting, some as “FX” and some as both.
Again, beyond confusing TF out of the audience, I’m not clear on what the value is. FX is a somewhat well-known brand, but it’s no HBO and besides, Hulu could use a lot more love.
On a macro level, it just makes no sense—the streaming ecosystem is confusing enough for viewers as it is—why make it more so?
4. The No Network Conundrum. With the exception of Abbott Elementary’s two nods (Best Comedy and Best Actress in a Comedy), all of the awards went to streaming shows. At this point, that’s not even newsworthy, but still a conundrum if you are trying to convince people under 70 that network prime time is still valuable.
What is notable though is who is dominating among the streamers: Hulu and Netflix, followed by Max and Apple.
Not much to read into that until we see if it impacts subscription numbers and churn, but it certainly gives all four some bragging rights, while yet again raising the question of just what exactly is Apple doing with Apple TV+.
The answer to which seems to be that they’re still figuring it out themselves.
The Emmys will air Sunday, September 15 on ABC and will then be streamed the day after on Hulu.
Not FX.
