Soapy, Sexy, Must-See Summer TV
Shows like 'Presumed Innocent' and 'House of the Dragon' are jump-starting the 2025 Emmy race (really!). Plus, how far can 'Inside Out 2' go at the Oscars?
Yes, I realize that I’ve spent my previous two dispatches telling Emmy voters about the very, very long list of performances they ought to catch up on or remember before filling out their ballots. There are more than 1,600 performances eligible for Emmy consideration, and far too many worthy ones to fit into the slots available.
But I’m here to tell you that there are even more performances worthy of your attention, and not even eligible for Emmy consideration until next summer.
TV marches onward, even as the first round of Emmy voting winds to a close, and this year’s crop of summer TV is off to an exceptional start. I’m not even talking about The Bear, which returns for its third season on Thursday — we’ll talk more about it then.
Whether you’re into large-scale fantasy battles, soapy procedurals or frisky romance, there’s a lot of reasons to stay indoors. If you’re really crazy, like me, you might even catch yourself having Emmy hopes a year in advance.
Dragon in the House
Before I get too far ahead of myself, I realize the networks premiering shows in June don’t really want me talking about their extremely premature Emmy hopes. Unlike the Oscars, where December’s awards frenzy is immediately followed by January’s dumping ground, the end of Emmy season doesn’t immediately lead to a flood of also-rans.
But the shows premiering in June do seem to be asking for a bit of breathing room from sky-high awards expectations. Even for The Bear, a reigning Emmy champ with more statues likely in its future, the awards focus for the moment is season two, with the new episodes of season three simply a valuable reminder of just how much we like spending time in Carmy’s kitchen.
HBO’s House of the Dragon, which made its splashy season two premiere last week, seems to be a prime example. It was nominated for nine Emmys for its first season, including best drama series, but with no nominations for its cast, writers or directors. It was, to put it mildly, a far cry from the massive awards haul its predecessor Game of Thrones garnered each year.
Allowed to continue filming through the strikes last year thanks to U.K. labor laws, House of the Dragon, in theory, could have squeezed into this year’s Emmy eligibility window. By premiering in June it’s not only getting out of the way of fellow HBO contender The Gilded Age, but giving itself room to grow.
Early notices on the current season of House of the Dragon suggest it’s doing more to emerge out of the Thrones shadow; Variety’s Alison Herman wrote that it’s “finally the show it was always meant to be.” It’s likely also benefiting from some distance from Prime Video’s Rings of Power, which debuted its first season just weeks after House of the Dragon’s debut in 2022 and turned the whole thing into some kind of fantasy prequel death match. Rings of Power will return on August 29, allowing the feuding houses of Westeros to wrap up their business before the clashes in Middle Earth get going.
Presumed Contender
Being a prequel or spinoff from a beloved and acclaimed series is one default way to attract awards attention. But there’s possibly even more power in a single name, and David E. Kelley, even after all these years, is still one of the most powerful there is.
Sure, his winning streak isn’t quite what it was in the ‘90s, when between L.A. Law, The Practice and Ally McBeal he was Emmy-nominated nearly every single year of that decade. But such Peak TV-era hits as Big Little Lies, The Undoing, and last year’s Nine Perfect Strangers suggest his brand of polished soapiness still has major appeal, and it’s back in full force on his current series, Apple’s Presumed Innocent.
Adapted from Scott Turow’s 1987 legal thriller, which also inspired the Harrison Ford film of the same name, Presumed Innocent puts Jake Gyllenhaal in the role of Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor who becomes the prime suspect in the murder of his former mistress. Fresh off the muscled-up mayhem of his Road House remake, Gyllenhaal is trying out a more average guy for size, one who you believe really might not be capable of such a brutal killing.
Gyllenhaal is appealing and a little bit shifty, precisely what the lead role requires, but it’s truly the ensemble surrounding him that makes Presumed Innocent a must-see event. I first had the series on my radar last year, when I interviewed Elizabeth Marvel and she told me she and her husband Bill Camp were working on it together and playing a couple — the rare pair of married celebrities who truly seem to enjoy working together as often as they can.
Marvel brings her usual steel and wit to her role, but in the episodes I’ve seen it’s Camp who truly gets to go off, playing a newly ousted state’s attorney who was once Rusty’s boss and is now his attorney. Many of the show’s most electric scenes feature Camp and Gyllenhaal going toe to toe with O-T Fagbenle, as the born-politician newly elected as state’s attorney, and his deputy played by Peter Sarsgaard — who, of course, is Gyllenhaal’s real-life brother-in-law.
Add in Ruth Negga as Rusty’s wife, who is far from willing to suffer silently as her husband makes mistake after mistake, and Renate Reinsve as Carolyn, the murdered woman with a complex history of her own, and every scene in Presumed Innocent has some fresh spark to it. I haven’t read the book or seen the Ford original, so there’s no guarantee the rest of the series will keep me hooked, but at the moment it’s the best I can hope for from summer TV viewing.
Will any of this translate to Emmy attention a full year from now? Oh, who knows. For the moment am I allowed to say, who cares? Right now the future Emmy calendar is a gloriously wide-open field. Let’s enjoy the freedom to enjoy what we feel like enjoying while we have it.
Filling Out Your Summer Viewing Watch List
I am but one person, so I haven’t yet caught up with a lot of the other TV that seems to be hitting with audiences. Bridgerton wrapped up its third season on June 13, and though the first half of the season premiered in May, the whole thing will be Emmy eligible next year.
We should expect a solid push for Nicola Coughlan, proud member of the “perfect breasts” community, as well as for the show’s impeccable crafts. After a dip in Emmy recognition for season two, it does feel like the Shonda Rhimes-backed series is on an upswing.
There’s also the return of Prime Video’s The Boys, a ratings hit and a surprise Emmy contender for its second season back in 2021. With Fallout looking likely to follow in The Boys’ footsteps as a best drama series nominee, Prime Video is staking an impressive claim for prestige genre TV. Can it pull it off for both The Boys and the second season of The Rings of Power at next year’s Emmys? A tall order, but like I said, the field is gloriously open now.
On the horizon is, again, The Bear, which as I write this has yet to share any screeners with critics and will be sending the internet’s content factory into a frenzy when it drops all 10 episodes on Thursday. (If there’s an Olivia Colman-sized cameo in a later episode and you don’t want it spoiled, I suggest you clear your schedule or stay offline, but for The Ankler, of course).
I imagine a lot of July 4 weekends will be spent discussing The Bear — I still remember talking to my mom about Jamie Lee Curtis’s appearance while floating in a lake last year — but summer TV will have a lot to offer after that. On the horizon in July is the period Apple series Lady in the Lake, starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram, and Peacock’s Roman gladiator series, For Those About to Die, with none other than Anthony Hopkins. Late August will bring the second season of Apple’s Pachinko, which sounds like a perfect Labor Day weekend binge to me.
Turning Ourselves Inside Out For Oscar
We Oscar types are unable to help ourselves, and whenever a movie is both critically acclaimed and commercially successful, we simply must ask: Could best picture be next? That question has perhaps inevitably been asked of Inside Out 2, which is still sitting astride the global box office and reviving our faith that the people haven’t given up on Hollywood just yet.
As David Sims and I discussed on last week’s Prestige Junkie podcast (you’ve subscribed already, right?), Inside Out 2 is basically a guaranteed nominee in best animated feature, but will face competition from DreamWorks Animation’s lush-looking The Wild Robot and inevitably from an international contender we can’t even see coming.
But Variety one-upped us by skipping right past animated feature and pondering its best picture chances. Using Top Gun: Maverick as a pretty valid comparison point, Clayton Davis argues that being the movie that saved the summer box office might give Inside Out 2 an edge even over the original, which — like every Pixar movie other than Up and Toy Story 3 — failed to crack the best picture lineup.
Personally I think the excitement around the expanded best picture lineup, plus Pixar’s late 2000s winning streak, is the only thing that allowed those other nominations to happen; if a Pixar movie ever does break back into best picture contention, it certainly won’t be a sequel, which struggle unless they’re Top Gun or Fury Road-sized smashes. With all love and devotion to Inside Out 2, which I’ll be seeing again this week with my kids, it probably serves the movie best to keep its Oscar ambitions in check for now.
