'Long Bright River', 'Adolescence' & Limited Series' Long Comeback
Inside the category's, yes, dramatic Emmy's evolution as 'The Penguin', 'Dying for Sex' and more reshape the race
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: An Oscar-nominated actress steps into a gritty role in a limited series adapted from a bestselling novel.
For all the talk about the end of Peak TV and the contraction affecting every stage of television development, the star-driven book adaptation remains one of the most reliable genres in television. And if it’s got a murder mystery hook, a la The White Lotus or Big Little Lies? Even better.
That’s not, as creator Nikki Toscano will tell you, the real point of Long Bright River, the Peacock limited series starring Amanda Seyfried that debuted on the streamer this month. The eight-episode adaptation of Liz Moore’s novel does follow Seyfried’s character Mickey, a beat cop in Philadelphia’s gritty Kensington neighborhood, as she tries to identify the killer of a group of unhoused women. But it’s the family drama between Mickey and her sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings) — reminiscent of other hit shows, like Mare of Easttown and True Detective — that drives Long Bright River, and elevates it.
“When I think about murder mysteries — yes, you can be aiming for a rug pull, but there needs to be some kind of emotional component behind that rug pull,” says Toscano, using a metaphor for the many moments in Long Bright River when Mickey reaches a new twist or revelation in her investigation. “Otherwise you’re just doing a straight-up procedural.”
Toscano has made a wide range of dramas throughout her career and before Long Bright River was the showrunner on the splashy Paramount+ limited series The Offer, about the making of The Godfather. For Long Bright River she worked closely with Moore, a television newcomer, in a process that Toscano has come to think of as her specialty. “I think that that’s really been more of my bag — shepherding somebody who was less experienced,” says Toscano, who spent the early months of the pandemic working with Moore on Zoom. “It was always just about putting ego aside on both of our parts and being like, ‘Okay, what is the best story? What are the things that are really important?’”
When Toscano and Moore first began developing Long Bright River in early 2020, the limited series format was still in what now feels like its heyday, making room on television for projects as ambitious as Watchmen or as emotionally rich as I May Destroy You. There are still limited series like that being made now, Long Bright River included, but in Hollywood’s current era of austerity and caution, it’s a whole lot harder for creators to let their big idea flourish. As one agent told my colleague Elaine Low last spring, “If you’re a story editor and you want to do a period limited show, the odds of that selling are like the odds of me becoming Jeff Bezos.”
“You just don’t make as much money with limited,” Toscano says, putting it plainly. “I mean, yes, you get a bunch of eyes. But obviously if you have an ongoing series, you’re amortizing all the decisions that you make over multiple seasons versus just a finite amount of time.”
Long Bright River, though filmed beautifully by the all-female directing team who shepherded the show (Hagar Ben-Asher, Mona Fastvold, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Meena Meron, Jessica Yu and Toscano on episode six), is not especially lavish by modern TV standards; its greatest effect is probably Seyfried’s performance as an officer whose unflagging optimism about her struggling neighborhood might feel familiar to Hollywood creatives trying to keep the business alive these days. The show is one of many actor-driven entries in this year’s limited series race, though the category overall seems a little quieter than in recent years.
How did the limited series go from the hottest thing in television to what feels like an increasingly rare gift? A quick history lesson.
Testing the Limits
Ten years ago, a change in the world of prestige TV had become so apparent that the Emmys had to change the rules to deal with it. After years of fielding just two or three nominees, or even being unceremoniously merged with the best TV movie category, the best miniseries Emmy category was in the midst of a major resurgence by the mid-2010s.
The term “miniseries,” introduced to the Emmys in the late 1980s, once had the air of stuffy prestige or hokey network excess about it — winners of the late 1990s and early aughts included many historical epics and Tom Hanks-Steven Spielberg collaborations like Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon. All of these were a far cry from the shows that were taking over television by 2015, when creators including Ryan Murphy and Noah Hawley were building the newfangled anthology shows American Horror Story and Fargo. Set in roughly similar universes from season to season, but with no recurring characters, both shows were evidence that television could head in some exciting new directions — and that the Emmys would have to change to keep up.
Changing the category from “outstanding miniseries”to “outstanding limited series” in 2015, the Emmys made space for a motley crew of prestigious, ambitious and incredibly starry shows to compete against each other. That first year the big winner was Olive Kitteridge, a literary adaptation shepherded by and starring Frances McDormand, which was up against another American Horror Story as well as two U.K. imports, The Honourable Woman and Wolf Hall. The next year it was Murphy’s turn to win the category he had in some ways invented, backing the blockbuster success The People vs. O.J. Simpson. The series made stars of Sterling K. Brown and Sarah Paulson and gripped viewers with a Game of Thrones-level intensity — all for a story whose ending was already very well known to everyone who lived through the ’90s.
From there it was one hugely starry limited series after another, from the first seasons of Big Little Lies and The White Lotus — yes, we all thought there would just be one at first — to ambitious literary adaptations like Watchmen and Fleishman is in Trouble. For actors who wanted the kind of meaty roles they could never find in a movie tentpole, but without the long-term commitment of a regular TV series, a limited series was an obvious step.
Yet that was also in some ways the beginning of the end, as Toscano puts it. “I think that more actors have flocked to limiteds because of the time commitment,” she says. “But the problem is that for a period of time, the salaries were rising and rising and rising, and then it got to a place where it was not cost effective at all.”
There are still many stories, like Long Bright River, that make the most sense in the limited series format and have the potential to dominate audience attention the way American Crime Story and Mare of Easttown did in their limited runs. So even with TV development seemingly pivoting elsewhere, toward shows that are cheaper and more endlessly replicable, the limited series lives on — and still boast many of the best performances you see among all the Emmy nominees in a given year.
So what will join Long Bright River in the limited series hunt this year? It might be a somewhat smaller field than in recent years, but no less powerful.
In the Mix
The good news for Seyfried is that she should be very comfortable running in the best actress in a limited series Emmy category — she won it just three years ago, for her performance as Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s stellar The Dropout. The bad news is that, once again, the competition is incredibly stiff, from a recent winner in this category to a multiple Oscar winner.
Of the shows that have already premiered, Cristin Milioti may have the biggest advantage from Max’s The Penguin, which has already earned her a Critics Choice Awards and a slew of nominations for her and her co-star Colin Farrell. But never underestimate Cate Blanchett, under pretty much all circumstances but particularly when she’s part of a lavish limited series like Apple’s Disclaimer, which also boasts Alfonso Cuarón as its writer and director. And there’s also Nicole Kidman, now as much of an Emmy stalwart as she is a movie star. Her Netflix series The Perfect Couple is expected to come back for a second season, as my colleague Lesley Goldberg exclusively reported, but it will go the anthology route, which makes Kidman very competitive here.
Among the cast of Irish newcomers in FX’s ambitious limited series Say Nothing, Lola Petticrew seems to be the standout and could represent the cast as a whole with a nomination here. But FX will have its hands full in this category, with the Michelle Williams-led Dying for Sex premiering April 4 and already getting a passionate response from the critics I know. Another recent premiere, Hulu’s Good American Family, could earn Ellen Pompeo her first-ever Emmy nomination, despite literal decades on one of the most successful TV shows of all time, Grey’s Anatomy.
The limited series category is not exclusively about actresses, of course. The buzziest contender in the category by far is Netflix’s Adolescence, the U.K. crime drama created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, who also plays a supporting role in the series. I’ll have much more to say about Adolescence later, but it’s got Baby Reindeer-level buzz at the moment, particularly for breakout 15-year-old star Owen Cooper.
Netflix will also be competing against itself, backing the similarly dark Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story as well as the Robert De Niro-led Zero Day. Same for Apple, which has Disclaimer as well as Presumed Innocent — like The Perfect Couple, it will continue as an anthology — and Dope Thief, starring Brian Tyree Henry.
Now that I look at all of that, maybe the limited series category isn’t so quiet after all? Whether or not development on the format has indeed slowed down, it will take a few years for the pipeline to show it. And in the meantime, we’ve all got a lot of good television to catch up on.
