Pencils down, Emmy voters! Final nomination round ballots are due tonight at 10 p.m. PT, so if you haven’t caught up on all of Pluribus yet, you still have a few hours to go!
For the last-minute voters out there, my colleague Christopher Rosen and I have put our heads together to pick five contenders apiece we really want to give one last boost of consideration. Yes, it was hard to narrow it down to just five each, and I at least tried to pick more than the contenders I’ve been banging the drum about all season or incessantly in the past week. There’s a lot of good stuff out there to choose from, Emmy voters! Here are just 10 more options we really, really don’t think you should ignore.
Katey’s Picks
Comedy Guest Actor: Connor Storrie, Saturday Night Live
Yes, it’s basically a backdoor way to get Heated Rivalry at the Emmys, despite the pesky rules that otherwise prevent it. But Connor Storrie’s SNL hosting gig in February — barely two months after his show’s first season wrapped and turned Storrie and Hudson Williams into overnight sensations — is genuinely worthy of recognition. His gift for physical comedy was on display in the stripper sketch — repurposed from his days on the L.A. clown scene — and the ice skating sketch that included a cameo from Williams. And maybe even more importantly, we must treat our rising stars with care — “lighting in a bottle,” says a casting director on Heated Rivalry — and giving them early awards recognition is a great way to do it. SNL hosts regularly occupy multiple slots in the guest acting categories, so you could include Storrie alongside, say, Bad Bunny and Ryan Gosling and have plenty of room left for someone from The Bear.
Comedy Supporting Actress: Erika Alexander, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins
In an ideal world, the entire cast of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins would be lining up for their Emmy nominations. But the NBC series, despite a well-deserved season two renewal, still feels like an underdog — so I’m focusing all my attention on someone who may be one of the most overdue actresses on television. After inspiring an entire generation of future lawyers as Maxine Shaw on Living Single, Erika Alexander has been a scene-stealer on shows as wide-ranging as Insecure and the sci-fi series Invasion. On Reggie Dinkins, she’s finally fully back in the spotlight, playing the hyper-competent ex-wife of Tracy Morgan’s messy ex-football player, Reggie. As Alexander told me back in April, being on an NBC sitcom more than 30 years after her breakthrough role on The Cosby Show is “big.” You know what would be even bigger? Alexander’s first-ever Emmy nomination.
Music & Lyrics: ‘A Stage Name,’ The Actor Awards (Kate Anderson and Elyssa Samsel)
We love it when awards shows support other awards shows, don’t we? Kristen Bell’s opening number for this year’s Actor Awards poked fun at the switch from its original SAG Awards name and incorporated the most essential element of any awards show opener: crowdwork! Jesse Plemons may have looked a bit confused to be included, but Chase Infiniti was delighted, and you assume everyone was at least paying attention in case they were next.
The song is also just zippy and well-done, coming from a songwriting duo who have done some Off-Broadway work as well as the songs for the Frozen Disney+ spinoff, Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, which — you’ll just have to believe me — has very good songs. They’ve got competition from another awards show opener, the massive musical number performed by Tony Awards host Cynthia Erivo and written by awards show stalwarts Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. But the Actor Awards feel like the scrappy underdog in this showdown, so I’m rooting for them especially.
Production Design: Grace Yun, Beef (‘The Increasing Flimsiness Of Any Certainties About The Future’)
The terrific second round of this anthology series once again followed Angelenos warring with one another, but found fantastic new corners of the city to unspool its drama, from the mountaintop country club where much of the story takes place to Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac’s would-be canyon dream home, if they could ever finish the renovations they’ve been doing for years. Production designer Grace Yun beautifully contrasts their elder millennial surroundings with the dinky starter apartment occupied by Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny and puts design front and center at the country club, where Mulligan’s character attempts a refresh, only to be met with immediate disapproval from the new owner, played by Youn Yuh-jung. It’s easier to notice production design when it’s part of the story, but Yun’s lush work would have stood out regardless.
Drama Writing: Jonathan Glatzer & Marie Hanhnhon Nguyen, The Audacity (‘The Valley of Heart’s Delight’)
What keeps The Audacity from being a tired spin on old Silicon Valley satires is, as creator Jonathan Glatzer told me back in May, the show’s focus on all kinds of stories from outside of the tech offices. That choice is on perfect display in this third episode, in which the anxieties of all the key characters are playing out in tiny battles — Billy Magnussen’s Duncan is warring with a spider in his bathroom, Sarah Goldberg’s JoAnne is trying to get her son’s stool sample to the right lab — but in grand, apocalyptic form too, as wildfires bear down on their corner of California. The episode perfectly matches The Audacity’s bitterness toward these tech titans with just the right amount of feeling sorry for them, plus the irresistible, absurd comedy of watching Duncan suffer over and over. The Audacity has been renewed for a second season but still feels like an Emmy race underdog; a surprise writing nomination, something the Emmys have been known to indulge in, could be a great way to get the show’s foot in that door.
Chris’ Picks
Comedy Supporting Actor: Ted McGinley, Shrinking
Caveats abound, of course: With only seven available category slots, the possibility of longshot contenders breaking through is challenging (even accounting for surprise nominees like Jeff Hiller last year) — plus, Shrinking already has multiple expected nominees for supporting actor, including Harrison Ford and Michael Urie, both of whom were nominated last year. But any good hangout show is only as good as its deep bench — and having a comedy pro like McGinley in this cast is basically a cheat code. “He’s just a fucking assassin,” Shrinking co-creator Brett Goldstein told Katey earlier this season of McGinley, a TV veteran who has appeared on everything from Happy Days to The Love Boat and Married… with Children. “You bring him in at the end of a scene, he says an amazing line and he walks out.” I’m not saying if McGinley were nominated that he’d pull a Hiller and win — but I’m also not not saying it either.
Drama Supporting Actor: Max Minghella, Industry
I’ve been doing my part for months to push Industry into the Emmy race (FYC here and here), but I won’t believe the Television Academy will come around on this show until they do. That said: Allow me to go once more unto the breach for Max Minghella. Added to the series for its transformative fourth season, Minghella’s character became the season’s central driving force — Whitney Halberstram (great name), a soulless fintech CEO who lies and cheats his way to exile in Lithuania to evade criminal prosecution and the Russian intelligence apparatus. Creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay told me they initially wrote Whitney as more of an all-American “blockhead,” but once Minghella was cast, everything locked into place. “Max is really quite hard to pin down, hard to gauge what background he is, hard to gauge where he’s even come from,” Down said. “We thought that really worked really well for the enigmatic character.” Minghella’s scenes with fellow supporting actor contender Kit Harington were some of the best ever on Industry, and while the former Game of Thrones nominee has gotten a good deal of praise for his strong performance, it was Minghella who tied it together. “He’s just very seductive as a performer,” Down said. “If Max was a more vulnerable performer in those scenes, it probably wouldn’t work.”
Drama Directing: Sam Levinson, Euphoria (‘In God We Trust’)
Call me John Locke: Don’t tell me what I can’t do. I realize the final season of Euphoria was, uh, to put it kindly, polarizing. I understand that there’s enough tabloid smoke and online scuttlebutt around the show to suggest several different feuds within its cast and crew. But I am a simple man, and when I see a director picking up pieces of Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese and Sergio Leone, throwing all that in a blender and shooting it on 65mm — well, it activates the deepest recesses of my cinephile heart. Levinson and his team treated this season of Euphoria like a giant movie and, you know what? It worked. The 90-minute finale was better than most releases this year — and it has me excited for whatever he does next. For now, a first nomination for directing, however, will suffice.
Music & Lyrics: ‘Mis Figuritas,’ Hacks (Carlos Rafael Rivera, David Stal)
We’ll never know if Deborah Vance’s Diane Warren song broke through with Grammy and Oscar voters, but we’ll always have “Mis Figuritas.” In the season premiere, in an effort to secure her legacy, Deborah (Jean Smart) cooks up a harebrained scheme to EGOT (win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony), and her choice to sneak in at the Grammys comes from McKinsey: “Apparently it is an incredibly weak year for one Grammy category — regional Mexican album, including tejano,” she says to an exasperated Ava (Hannah Einbinder) before stepping into the recording booth to feature on “Mis Figuritas.” It’s one of the funniest jokes in the season, sold not just by Smart’s incredible vocal work on the song — but Einbinder’s reaction shots. I realize this is only a category for music and lyrics, but come on: The whole scene deserves Emmy recognition.
Score: Joel P. West, Wonder Man
I wasn’t the only score-head to flip for Nicholas Britell’s Old Hollywood throwback music from Jay Kelly last fall. But what if I told you Joel P. West did it better? For Wonder Man, West — the great composer behind multiple Destin Daniel Cretton projects, including Short Term 12 and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings — recontextualizes classic Hollywood sounds (think: an emphasis on timpani drums) for the modern superhero genre. “Hollywood’s always kind of retelling stories about itself, and its memory is very blurry — it’s just such a funny little circus that’s happening to itself and within itself,” West told me. “That ended up being the direction: leaning into extreme, but only if it felt really authentic.” Good job. The catchy, bouncy, melancholy score he came up with is one of the year’s best in TV or film.
