4 Emmy Races With Major Drama
'Hacks' vs. 'Bear'! Can anyone beat Meryl? Billy Crudup . . . again! Plus: My idea for an Oscars host
Do you feel that spirit of competition in the air? No, not the Paris Olympics — the approaching Emmy voting, of course!
Fine, fine. Even awards obsessives like me likely are more swept up in gymnastics scores and rugby matches right now than Hollywood prizes, with final Emmy voting starting two weeks from today. But as slow as August can feel, it’s when many awards season pieces start falling into place, from film festival lineups — hopefully you listened to me and Chris Feil discussing those on the podcast this week — to last-minute Emmy campaigns.
So back into the awards season breach we go, starting with some speculation about next year’s Oscars host — yes, it’s that time again – and continuing with a look at four Emmy races with some genuine drama behind them, whether we expected it or not.
Oscars Search For a Host
It appears to be true that Jimmy Kimmel has told Oscars producers he won’t be returning to host next year’s show, and his most natural successor John Mulaney — who was a smashing success as host of the un-televised Governors Awards last fall — has also turned down the job due to scheduling commitments.
Mulaney has seemed game for the job in the past, so it’s not unreasonable to hold out hope that he might take the stage someday. For now it’s still back to the drawing board for next year’s host, but absolutely not too late to come up with somebody great.
If Kimmel has proven anything in his four stints as host, including easily the most chaotic Oscar moment of all time, it’s that you don’t have to do anything innovative as host. Steering the ship with confidence and a little bit of humor is really all it takes. Rewatching the 2004 Oscars recently, which included an extensive tribute to Bob Hope following his death the previous year, I was struck by how well his clubby, self-deprecating humor has held up over the years.
If there were an obvious modern equivalent to Hope they would have hired them by now; it’s clearly not that easy. But I do hope that this year’s Oscar producers, who have yet to be announced, don’t over-complicate things in their search. Kimmel proved that the job can be challenging but not entirely thankless, asking a host to be present but not too present, and just a little bit reverent of the awards themselves. My personal choice for the job for years has been Keke Palmer, but I know there are at least a dozen charismatic hosts out there who could be up for the job.
We would have been just fine if Kimmel had done the job for decades the way Hope did, but at least he’s set things up well for someone else to be ready to pick up the mic.
Races That Are Actually Competitive
Sure, the Emmy nominations largely turned out as expected — you remember, a big day for FX, a huge show of support for The Morning Show, etc. But knowing the actual nominees has raised the stakes in a number of key races as well. From underestimating the appeal of Only Murders in the Building to possibly overestimating the dominance of Shogun (yes, it’s possible), we pundits made assumptions that the nominations were quick to put to rest.
As I’ve said many times before, the second phase of Emmy season doesn’t have the drama of the Oscars, where precursor awards like SAG and the BAFTAs give us an actual glimpse into how momentum shifts. But voters are still using this time to make their decisions, and based solely on the nominations themselves I can see some tough choices to make. Here are four races where there seems to be actual potential for a nail-biter, or at least some genuine competition. I’ll have four more to share in Monday’s edition.
I. Actress in a Comedy
When The Bear stars Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri and Ebon Moss Bachrach finally accepted their first Emmys in January, it felt like the first part of a two-step coronation process. By then the show’s even more acclaimed second season had aired, and it was a given that The Bear would only be a bigger force at the year’s second Emmy ceremony.
That came true: The Bear broke the all-time record for nominations for a comedy series, with 23, and will be a strong contender in at least as many categories as it was last time. But Edebiri is in the unusual position of having shifted categories, moving from supporting actress to lead for a season in which she took her place firmly as a co-lead of the series.
Given the enthusiasm around The Bear and Edebiri’s incredible rising star over the past year, she’s still a formidable contender in lead. But so is Jean Smart, who returned after a three-year Hacks hiatus and a significant health scare to lead what might be the Max series’s best season yet. There’s also reigning champion Quinta Brunson, who now has Emmys both for starring in and writing Abbott Elementary, a show that’s also only gotten better as it’s continued.
General consensus seems to think that White and Bachrach will cruise to return victories while Edebiri will lose to Smart, given the Emmys’ ongoing tendency to reward past winners over and over again. It’s a tough choice given how essential Edebiri is to The Bear — but when you’ve got this much talent in the same race, it’s never easy.
II. Supporting Actress in a Comedy
When we made our Emmy nomination predictions on the Prestige Junkie podcast, Gold Derby’s Chris Rosen boldly predicted that Meryl Streep would be snubbed for her performance in Only Murders in the Building. That obviously didn’t happen: Only Murders earned an exceptional 21 nominations and seems to have pulled off the rare feat of getting even more popular with the TV Academy with each season.
So Meryl is in after all, and underestimating her has never served anybody. But she is most likely now in a tight race with Hannah Einbinder who, like Smart, was at the center of Hacks’s excellent season — particularly its intensely emotional finale.
Einbinder has never won an Emmy for her role on Hacks; for that matter neither has Liza Colon-Zayas for her own breakout performance on The Bear, though given that her showcase episode is part of season three, voters might feel inclined to wait another year for her.
But can either of them beat Meryl? Streep is also set to return for the fourth season of Only Murders, though I would guess she’s in less of a showcase role than she was last season. Despite the skepticism about whether she’d make it into the nominee lineup at all, I suspect she might be the one to beat.
III. Writing and Directing for a Comedy
The standout comedies — whether or not you actually think The Bear is a comedy — will be going head-to-head at the Emmys for the first time this year. While the acting categories have all the caveats I’ve discussed above, the writing and directing categories are likely where the competition really heats up.
Hacks went all in on the season finale “Bulletproof,” with series co-creator Lucia Aniello nominated for directing as well as for writing alongside her fellow creators Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky. That could give them an edge in the directing category, where The Bear could split its own vote with two nominees — “Fishes” for series creator Christopher Storer and “Honeydew” from Ramy Youssef.
In the writing category both Hacks and The Bear are fielding single episodes (The Bear is nominated for “Fishes”), and it’s not impossible to imagine both losing to Brunson for her Abbott Elementary episode “Career Day.” At this point, I’d guess it’s most likely to see The Bear win for directing, given that show’s general emphasis on style, and Hacks to pull it off for writing, but both categories seem like nail-biters right now.
IV. Supporting Actor in a Drama
Before the Emmy nominations were announced, Billy Crudup— who won an Emmy for The Morning Show in 2020 — seemed like the show’s best chance at an acting nomination. But when The Morning Show earned a spectacular 16 nominations, with 10 for acting alone, Crudup suddenly seemed like a potential winner, too.
To do that, though, he’ll have to get past both Tadanobu Asano and Takehiro Hira, the only Shogun actors nominated in a category together and therefore potentially more likely to split the vote. (Anna Sawai and Hiroyuki Sanada have their respective acting categories to themselves, and both are expected to win) Vote-splitting among the supporting actors is definitely possible, but to me Asano is the obvious standout as the morally shifty Yabushige, who is often the comic relief of the solemn Shogun but also has one of the show’s most emotional scenes in the final episode.
But is that me just underestimating The Morning Show, the same way so many of us did before the nominations? Maybe! The show has undeniable staying power with the Television Academy, and with Shogun poised to win in so many other categories, it’s possible to imagine Crudup and his higher name recognition stepping to the front of the line.
On Monday I’ll run down four more categories with the potential for major drama, including a showdown between Oscar-winning actresses and an upstart challenging one of the most long-running Emmy winners of all time.
