The television industry is contracting, and fast. Peak TV has already peaked, and the number of new shows being made year-on-year is shrinking all the time. Before long, if things continue like this, there won’t be space for a snubs and surprises article like this when the Emmy nominations are announced, because there won’t be enough shows for either.
The Emmys seem to know this, too, which is why today’s nominations were filled with more snubs and surprises than ever. Look at the nomination list and even the most passive viewer will find something to become wildly apoplectic about.
Chief among them will be the lack of anything at all for The Curse. To sit through the whole thing was maddening, yes, but look at the pedigree involved. Emma Stone – an actor who basically exists to win Oscars at this point – gave a much better, more nuanced performance than she did in Poor Things. A Safdie brother co-created it. The final episode was unlike anything that you had ever seen on television before. Christopher Nolan chaired a Q&A about the show because he loved it so much. Christopher Nolan, for crying out loud! There is no sane world in which The Curse was going to win anything, but it definitely deserved something.
Also, where was the nomination for Cosmo Jarvis? By all accounts, Shōgun is shaping up to be this year’s drama series to beat; a big, rich, sumptuous prestige drama like they used to make 15 years ago. It deliberately laboured over detail authenticity, refused to pander to the lowest common denominator and contained endless gripping performances. Hiroyuki Sanada was nominated for his, and Anna Sawai was nominated for hers. Quite rightly, it earned more nominations than any other show.
And yet Jarvis – who managed to act as the eyes of the western audience while simultaneously being the heart of the show and the comic relief – is not among them. On the plus side, Shōgun announced Jarvis as an almighty presence, and he’ll do great things in the future. But it’s criminal that he was overlooked here.
Another genuine surprise was the omission of Netflix’s Everyone’s in LA talkshow in the variety talkshow category. Here was a series that existed specifically to disrupt the stale and dwindling talkshow landscape. It was chaotic and rooted in a specific location. It was abstract and extremely beautiful to look at. It was bold enough to openly state during broadcast which episode would be submitted for Emmy consideration. It’s possibly the best, most singular thing that John Mulaney has ever done. When the dust settles in the coming months, there is more than a fighting chance that Everyone’s in LA will be my favourite show of any genre of 2024.
But no. The nominated talkshows are The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night With Seth Meyers and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. They’re all fine, but they’re all safe. They’re the shows you watch if you want to listen to tired old Trump gags. But Everyone’s in LA is the show you watched if you wanted to see the character Waingro from the movie Heat perform a standup set about how he was killed. It was spectacular. This is a crime.
Other shows will be disappointed by their lot. Masters of the Air was much-hyped as the sweeping culmination of a project that started with Band of Brothers, but nobody paid any attention to it and it was only awarded with a scattering of technical nominations. Similarly Expats must be disappointed, because the whole thing seemed to be conceived and made to win Emmys, but it did a Curse and came away with nothing.
But let’s not forget that this article is about surprises as well as snubs, and the happiest surprise of all is that Matt Berry has been nominated for What We Do in the Shadows. The show itself has probably rolled on for a year or two longer than it needed to, which could have hurt its chances, but Berry’s powerhouse performance is one of the greatest comedy roles of all time.
Other good news is that Curb Your Enthusiasm’s final series has been noticed, when there was every chance that it was such a part of the furniture that nobody would notice, and that the incredible last season of Reservation Dogs has been recognised. None of these will win of course, because the Emmys are still labouring under the misapprehension that The Bear is a comedy, but that’s a gripe for a different article …
