Surprise! TV's New ‘Reindeer’ Games
Surprise! TV's New ‘Reindeer’ Games
How Netflix's sudden hit will rock the Emmys. Plus: Gosling hustle and the likely next EGOT is . . .
Hello there, brilliant Ankler subscribers: I’m Katey, your new Prestige Junkie columnist and The Ankler’s awards editor. I was previously the awards editor at Vanity Fair and the host of the Little Gold Men podcast, where each week my co-hosts and I dug deep into the many ups and downs of both Emmy and Oscar season. I’m excited to do the same here at the Ankler, digging into the contenders themselves and talking to the people who make them. I love following the horse race of awards season — trust me, the guest actor race at the Emmys is always fascinating — but also the story of why these things became contenders in the first place, and what they say about the industry throwing awards at them.
Yes, I’ve seen your emails— there will be news about a podcast soon. (Feel free to email me in the meantime with tips, gossip, and 3 Body Problem theories at katey@theankler.com)
I try to avoid calling myself an awards expert, because the minute you assume you know how these things go, they will change. Just when you think the drama series race will take shape around Succession and the final season of Ozark, for example, suddenly everyone’s talking about something called Squid Game.
The Television Academy hasn’t undergone the upheaval that the Oscars have in the past 10 years, but it is constantly changing, from the endless rule tweaks to its own diversity efforts. As much as the Emmys once deserved its reputation for rubber-stamping the same winners year after year — it’s still mind-boggling how many Emmys Julia Louis-Dreyfus won in the 2010s — it has recently shown the ability to change and recognize something new.
Just ask Michaela Coel. The I May Destroy You auteur was named one of Time’s most influential people of the year after her series premiered on HBO in June 2020, so revered that her Golden Globes snub was a likely inciting incident for the complete overhaul of the Hollywood Foreign Press. By the time the show won two Emmys, including one for Coel for writing, she was on her way to Wakanda and becoming one of the industry’s brightest rising stars.
Or Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Fleabag was a modest phenomenon when its first season aired in 2016, but was hardly a “cast her in Indiana Jones” household name before Fleabag’s second season won six Emmys.
But I May Destroy You had nearly a year of runway to build its case with Emmy voters, as well as acclaim for Coel’s previous series Chewing Gum; Fleabag had that first season, which had its share of awards attention on both sides of the pond.
And now, with just a few weeks left for shows to qualify for Emmy consideration, we’re watching a new creator-star emerge — a scrappy challenger to some of the most lavish shows in the history of TV for the limited series crown.
A Baby Reindeer is Born
Surely I had misheard them. Surely my friend was not telling me to catch up on Emmy contenders by watching something called Baby Reindeer.
This happens at least once every Emmy season, even for those of us whose jobs are to know the main contenders six months before the nominations are even announced. For an awards show known for being so predictable, it’s a relief when something new and unexpected can break through.
This year that breakthrough is, undeniably, something called Baby Reindeer. Launching globally on Netflix on April 11, it shot to the top of the streamer’s English-language TV charts, knocking out far more lavish Netflix originals like 3 Body Problem and The Gentlemen. Both series are still expected to be major contenders for the streamer, and 3 Body Problem in particular had its own moment of dominating the discourse. But none had Baby Reindeer’s element of genuine surprise.
Baby Reindeer was such a surprising Emmy contender that its entry into the limited-series race was “announced” via Deadline exclusive. Even series creator and star Richard Gadd seemed surprised by the whole thing: “Who knew this weird story about a self-sabotaging comedian getting stalked and living in the aftermath of abuse would go on to touch so many people’s lives?”
That is, if you don’t know yet, actually the premise of Baby Reindeer, based very closely on Gadd’s own experience of being stalked by a woman while dealing with unresolved trauma from a previous assault. Though it starts off with the trappings of a more typical autobiographical project from a comedian — wry voiceover, colorful coworker characters, extended scenes of stand-up performance — it very quickly skews darker, thanks both to the behavior of Jessica Gunning’s stalker character Martha and the self-loathing of Gadd’s on-screen avatar, Donny Dunn.
As you might have heard, stories about trauma are impossible to avoid these days, and Baby Reindeer’s unflinching tone has hit a nerve. It has a remarkable 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the most effusive raves praising it as “a vulnerable and candid account of varied abuses.” This is a show people are choosing to binge!
The show’s success creates an undeniable opportunity for Netflix, which has Gadd and co-stars Dunning and Nava Mau participating in an FYC event in Los Angeles on May 7. (It’s also inspired some internet sleuths to dig into the true story, sparking controversy that Netflix likely hopes will die down by the time voting begins.)
Baby Reindeer is breaking too late to score things like trade covers or glossy magazine features, but it’s benefiting from online chatter so widespread that it’s difficult for anyone in the industry to miss it. Can Richard Gadd become the next Coel or Waller-Bridge?
More crucially, can Netflix pivot fast enough to make it happen?
Baby Reindeer premiered about two months before Emmy voting begins, and exactly in the period where every other contender is vying for its own share of voter attention.
Gadd, like Waller-Bridge, first developed his series as a one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He was also previously a writer for Netflix’s Sex Education, but was more or less an unknown before his series conquered the streamer’s charts. Although the Emmys are not exactly the Golden Globes — who rarely miss an opportunity to crown a television ingénue — it likes putting their stamp on exciting new talent as much as anyone else in Hollywood.
But Gadd may not get the chance to pull a Waller-Bridge and indulge in a cigarette while flanked by his Emmys. Competition in limited series is tough, following last year’s somewhat soft slate that was entirely dominated by Beef. In lead actor alone, Netflix will be fielding both Gadd and Andrew Scott (Ripley), but it has it easy compared to FX’s four serious contenders: Shogun’s Cosmo Jarvis and Hiroyuki Sanada, Feud’s Tom Hollander and Fargo’s Jon Hamm (the only previous Emmy winner in this bunch).
As a writer, Gadd may fare better. That’s the award both Coel and Waller-Bridge won, along with fellow TV auteurs Mike White (The White Lotus), Lee Sung Jin (Beef) and Cord Jefferson (Watchmen, four years before winning his adapted screenplay Oscar for American Fiction in March).
Netflix is emphasizing Gadd in that category more than as an actor, while Dunning has a much clearer path in supporting actress — as does Mau, who would be one of the still vanishingly few trans actresses to earn a major award nomination. But again, they’ve got to get past sprawling, technically lavish seasons of Shogun, Fargo, Ripley, Feud, True Detective, The Sympathizer and Masters of the Air first.
The Emmys love a breakout star, but it also really loves high production values.
Gosling’s Awards Season/Summer Movie Jujitsu
This weekend’s release of The Fall Guy closed the book on one of my favorite mini-stories of this past Oscar season: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt using the fumes from the Barbenheimer phenomenon to push their next would-be juggernaut. Their patter together as Oscar presenters was genuinely charming, and when they arrived at SXSW for The Fall Guy premiere a few days later, it was a bit like watching a magic trick. Kitty Oppenheimer and Ken . . . riding in the back of a pickup truck . . . in Texas?? Rarely is the switchover from the muted prestige of Oscar season to the anything-for-a-photo-op mania of summer season so easily visible. They then repeated the trick on SNL — no pickup but still pretty good.
The Fall Guy, which opened to a fairly soft $28 million domestic, is probably not going to follow Barbie or Oppenheimer’s path toward global box-office billions or Oscar nominations. But it’s still a feather in the cap for Blunt and especially Gosling, who’s in a much clearer spot as a movie star than the last time he had an early summer movie with “Guy” in the title. Back in 2016, The Nice Guys was a way for Gosling and Russell Crowe — each with well-earned reputations for taking everything on-screen way too seriously — to finally loosen up a bit.
Despite critical acclaim and the residual heat from director Shane Black being fresh off Iron Man 3, Nice Guys stalled out at $71 million worldwide — quite possibly because no one believed back then either of them could be funny.
Though The Fall Guy is not entirely a comedy, the newly Kenergized Gosling has his movie-star charisma and charm dialed way up, and has no trouble selling either the film's death-defying action sequences or silliest gags. It seems likely the next 10 years of his career will look a whole lot more like this than, say, the gloom of Blade Runner 2049.
Weirdly enough, there are more of this year’s Oscar contenders in the Emmy race than in summer movie season — Robert Downey Jr., Annette Bening, Jodie Foster, Emma Stone and Lily Gladstone could all very well be winners at September’s ceremony. Given The Fall Guy’s modest opening weekend, maybe Emmy success is the safer post-Oscar route after all.
The Next EGOT
One last thing: Regardless of how you feel about the existence of a sequel to 2019’s “live-action” Lion King, there was one detail that really ought to catch your attention from last week’s trailer for Mufasa: The Lion King: “with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda.”
Miranda is a two-time Oscar nominee for Disney movies, first for the Moana power ballad “How Far I’ll Go” that deserved to beat La La Land, and then for Encanto’s ill-fated “Dos Oruguitas,” submitted for the original song category before “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” emerged as the film’s runaway hit.
A Tony, Emmy and Grammy winner several times over, Miranda is the most obvious next candidate for an EGOT. Whether or not Mufasa surpasses expectations, Miranda’s songs rarely disappoint. Between him and Wicked star Cynthia Erivo, who is also only an Oscar away from an EGOT, it’s an extra layer of competition to look out for once Oscar season gets started in earnest.
Why do we have EGOT? Surely the entertainment world's greatest of all time is also a GOTE
KATEY!!!!! Crushed it.