As always, another passing year bears familiar instances – birthdays, major holidays, desperate inquiries about the seemingly unattainable end to a global pandemic, etc. – for all to engage with and reflect upon, but in the entertainment sphere, awards season supplants those trios of months that fluctuate among hot, cold and “Can it just decide already?” with a perennial system that straddles honoring film, television and in the case of the Screen Actors Guild Awards and now-infamous Golden Globes, an often disorienting combination of both.
However, just as the Academy Awards punctuates for film the exhaustive cycle of cutthroat studio campaigning and esteemed artists receiving those coveted golden statues, the Primetime Emmy Awards does the same for the best of the small screen, as selected by the Television Academy’s voting body. Essentially, nominees and winners are divided into three distinct categories: Comedy, Drama and Limited Series/Television Movie.
In the Comedy section, Apple TV+ and London-based show Ted Lasso was sovereignly crowned as Outstanding Comedy Series. The inaugural season of the airy, jubilant series was met with immense acclaim when it premiered in August of last year. The smash-hit acted as a tonic for fraught and divided times, fervently and unabashedly celebrating the whimsical connections of its central makeshift family, a struggling soccer team in England on a detrimental losing streak, and chipper goodwill of its titular American coach, rapturously played by Jason Sudeikis.
The passion for this program was abound with Sudeikis triumphing in Comedy Lead Actor, one of two resounding wins of the night for this genre, while his costars Hannah Waddingham and Brett Goldstein suitably prevailed in the supporting categories, though I’m a bit devasted that Bowen Yang didn’t win for his Earth-shattering tenure on SNL this season.
Ted Lasso is certainly an utter delight and a worthy champion. My affections, though, have lied with the scathingly fresh showbusiness satire Hacks since this season’s genesis, and because the television medium doesn’t become much better than this sublime debut season, I was absolutely giddy with its three immensely deserved wins. Jean Smart, a seasoned industry veteran, has been a lock the millisecond her searingly resonant, boldly flamboyant portrayal of a disaffected comedienne graced the screens of HBO Max in May, and she received a thunderous standing ovation when her name was announced.
Like its volcanically cathartic and keenly effervescent portrayal of two women navigating the entertainment sphere in a post-#MeToo era, Hacks on Emmys night held some deeper, more profound surprises, also being lauded with the Comedy Directing and Comedy Writing accolades. The glamorously monumental program underscores the power, redemption and resilience of marginalized female creative voices, so it was quite poignant to witness Lucia Aniello awarded the directing honor with warranted gusto.
The Emmys may lead you to believe that these two albeit amazing shows are the only comedies worthy of your attention, but some other marvelous programs were met empty-handed. I am particularly partial to the deliciously stylish and assuredly incisive pulp of HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant, complete with a virtuoso turn from Kaley Cuoco, who certainly would have won if one of the foundational goddesses of TV weren’t mustering the performance of a lifetime, and the tragicomic farce of PEN15, which delicately finds the pathos in its brash middle school antics.
This was a watershed moment for women talent and the first year where female directors won in both the Comedy and Drama categories, with Jessica Hobbs respectively associated with the latter for the riveting Netflix program The Crown. The lavish period drama, which chronicles the decades-spanning reign of Queen Elizabeth II, achieved an unprecedented clean sweep in all seven major categories (the only other program to ever attain this was Schitt’s Creek on the Comedy side the previous year); surprisingly, even though Netflix has been a seminal and formative service in the age of streaming in Hollywood, this was the goliath platform’s first series win, having been outpaced by both Hulu and Amazon Prime.
Mirroring the Shakespearean twists of the show, though more clarity manifests in hindsight, Oscar-winning and revered thespian Oliva Colman prevailed in the Lead Actress category over newcomer Emma Corrin, whose engrossing, uncanny performance as Princess Diana was seen as a frontrunner for the entirety of this season. Gillian Anderson’s towering tour de force as the vividly complex Margaret Thatcher was rightfully bestowed with a Supporting Actress statue.
However, as exquisite as The Crown is, it’s indubitably unfortunate that this steamroller monopolized the entire dramatic slate, leaving revolutionary shows like the racially charged and astonishing Lovecraft Country and groundbreaking LGBT-driven Pose completely goose-egged. In such a banner year for representation behind and in front of the screen, with more people of color nominated than ever before, this supposed panorama of winners was egregiously narrow: All acting recipients this year were white. This is, frankly, abhorrent and indicative of a voting body in desperate need of more diversity and democracy.
Crystallizing all wins to a single program only seems to underline that the Television Academy haphazardly gravitates to the shows with the most word-of-mouth and doesn’t actually watch the full range of programs it nominates. This occurrence was at its most blatant when Tobias Menzies, whose arc this season was meager at best, prevailed in Supporting Actor over the recently deceased Michael Kenneth Williams, who delivered vastly superior, soul-stirring work on Lovecraft Country.
The Miniseries crop of winners was a bit more eclectic; this was additionally likely the most robust slate of nominees, including The Underground Railroad and I May Destroy You, with the only outlier being WandaVision, which, though strikingly innovative in bouts, ultimately devolved into MCU gloss masquerading as prestige fare. Runaway Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit, a classically compelling, pensively crafted chess drama, won the top prize along with Directing.
Woefully, for such a progressive, nuanced show that depicted the transcendence of a female chess prodigy, dexterously played by Anya Taylor-Joy, in a patriarchal society, the attitudes of its male creators skewed myopic. Director Scott Frank first forcefully protracted his acceptance speech to a gratuitous three minutes, which simply seemed self-righteous and pompous. Then, producer William Horberg made several reductive, generalized statements, the most flagrant of which was explicitly thanking Taylor-Joy for “making chess sexy again.”
Hard-boiled and surprisingly tender small-town detective thriller Mare of Easttown took home three acting accolades; the show is thrillingly etched with so much sincerity and tension in its New England mundanity, underpinning its procedural trappings with wallops of subtle emotion. Julianne Nicholson and Evan Peters dominated the Supporting categories; some expected Kathryn Hahn to win for her decadently campy WandaVision villainess, but Nicholson’s grueling, indelible sledgehammer portrayal in the Mare finale is indisputable.
The height of the HBO series’s acting haul, though, is Kate Winslet’s lead win for the titular role, the crème de la crème of her extremely chaptered career. It marks the palpable, emotive effect of a performer at the height of her powers, grippingly depicting with authentic fervor (Winslet opted for no disingenuous sheens of make-up or post-production alterations) a grieving mother whose plight and ultimate redemption are a testament to the universal strength and compassion of motherhood. The role itself is groundbreaking, a complicated woman in her 40s that Winslet makes all the more achingly human.
However, the pinnacle of the evening was writer/director/creator/actress Michaela Coel’s Writing win (the first Black woman to do so) for I May Destroy You, an unflinchingly candid look into sexual assault. Coel tore through and burrowed into the hazy trauma of her own assault experience with such eloquence and, resultantly, generated a prickly, cathartic and masterful manifesto on this issue. The advice she imparted was of infinitely sage wisdom: “Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn’t comfortable. I dare you. Visibility these days somehow equates to success. Do not be afraid to disappear – from it, from us – for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.”
With another passing year, let us not only collectively evolve as a society but also conquer ourselves on our own terms, or as Coel astutely states, disappear within our very beings, graciously actualizing in the process. The Emmys may be fallible, and they certainly are not absolved from their shortcomings, but celebrating artistry and profundities like Coel’s make them worthwhile. Around all the coal (pun not intended), you discover a diamond in the rough, a beacon of hope for a more fulfilling existence.
The full list of winners and nominees can be found here, via USA Today.
Photo Credit / The Reliable News
