The Emmys’ Reality TV Problem — And How to Fix It
Then again, maybe best not to worry too much about it? Plus: the summer’s realest Oscar buzz
When we Emmy obsessives make our predictions for each year’s nominations, we sometimes don’t even bother with the reality competition category. There’s variation in there sometimes — Survivor made it back into the lineup last year for the first time since 2006, The Masked Singer had a surprise breakthrough in 2020 — but it’s almost always the same six to eight shows getting the nominations.
It’s even more predictable when it comes to winners. Save for a genuine surprise in 2021, when Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Girls triumphed, the winner has been RuPaul’s Drag Race since 2018; in the reality host category, RuPaul himself is on a remarkable eight-year winning streak.
Reality TV is supposed to be a world of experimentation and wild ideas, where housewives can become semi-fictionalized celebrity versions of themselves and a show about people eating grubs can become a bastion of good old-fashioned family entertainment. So why have the Emmys been so consistently stuck in a rut when it comes to rewarding them?
I started thinking about all of this after reading Cue the Sun!, the new book from New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum that traces the origins of our current reality TV world back even earlier than Candid Camera and The Newlywed Game. Nussbaum makes the convincing argument that reality TV is not just some depraved product of our modern era but the organic result of humanity’s natural fascination with itself — shepherded to television by showmen like Chuck Barris and Mark Burnett who have known how to get all the most provocative stuff on tape, for better and for worse.
Game shows and reality programming have been part of television since the very beginning, but reality’s primetime Emmy categories were only added in the early 2000s — evidence that it took about 50 years for TV’s highest echelons to feel ready to embrace it. Will it take another 50 for the nominations to actually resemble the quality and variety of what’s out there?
I’ll get into that later on, but first — genuine Oscar buzz! In July!
Listen Up for Sing Sing
When I first saw Sing Sing at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, most attention was on a different Colman Domingo project: Netflix’s Rustin, which went on to earn Domingo his first Oscar nomination.
Rustin, decently well-received but mostly for Domingo’s performance, never seemed strong enough to push Domingo past best actor heavyweights like Cillian Murphy and Paul Giamatti. But just like Colin Firth, who got his long-awaited first nomination for A Single Man and then won the following year for The King’s Speech, Domingo may be about to go directly from that Rustin nomination to a best actor win.
After A24 picked up the film following its TIFF premiere, that best actor campaign seemed all but guaranteed. But when I rewatched Sing Sing a few weeks ago, in preparation to talk to Domingo on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast, I was surprised by how much it now feels like a very real best picture contender. Finely crafted and deeply rooted in its setting — the theater program at the Sing Sing maximum security prison — Sing Sing has a little bit of that scrappy CODA vibe, full of well-earned emotions.
It’s also incredibly socially relevant, made in collaboration with formerly incarcerated people who were part of the theater program, and committed to depicting the humanity of people in the prison system. Social issue dramas are older than the Oscars themselves, and on that front Sing Sing shares some DNA with Nomadland, which approached income inequality from a similarly ground-level, authentic perspective.
That said, in this era of the Oscars it’s often better for a best picture contender not to be like anything else that’s come before it. Sing Sing tells a classic story of putting on a show and forging unlikely friendships, through methods that feel entirely new.
Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, who plays himself in the film, and John “Divine G” Whitfield, who is played by Domingo, are the film’s co-writers and executive producers. Both will likely be invaluable players in promoting the film’s release. Just look at the sheer power of a single statement made by Maclin in a Deadline story about the film’s special screening at the Sing Sing correctional facility:
We, the men and women who lived it, find our peace knowing the world can hear us. To go back in and have the opportunity to show my brothers that life after prison is possible. To be able to demonstrate that society can receive us as we are, broken and healed. To show them they do have redeeming qualities, that have a place in society is what drives me to continue spreading the word. We exist. We are coming home. And we can help.”
A24 has a familiar playbook to follow for this one — last year it released Past Lives in early June, rolled it out slowly and carefully through awards season, and earned a best picture and best original screenplay nomination in the process. Personally I think Sing Sing could go even further — so if you want to get in on the ground floor, go see it this weekend and find out what people like me have been raving about.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury
Sing Sing director Greg Kwedar will have a busy fall ahead, but he’s made time on his schedule in October for the San Quentin Film Festival, the first-ever film festival held inside a prison. Kwedar will be on the festival’s industry jury alongside fellow directors Elegance Bratton and Taylor Hackford, plus a list of actors that includes Jeffrey Wright, Billy Crudup and Mary Louise Parker.
Students of mid-2000s gossip may be startled by that last pair of names, but they’re not the only people who seem to be making public amends by serving on a jury together. Fifteen years after their reportedly contentious time serving on the Cannes jury, Isabelle Huppert and director James Gray will reunite to serve on the jury for this year’s Venice Film Festival, with Huppert as the jury chair. (Gray, for his part, has denied tension between them, so maybe there’s no making up to do at all).
So far the festival’s only confirmed title is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but hope springs eternal for new films from Luca Guadagnino, Pedro Almodovar, Pablo Larrain and Mike Leigh to be announced in the coming weeks.
Do Not Adjust Your Television Set
Now back to reality, or what passes for reality amid the unscripted TV we have today. Reality is a vast and varied landscape, and many of the shows that dominate pop culture — Vanderpump Rules, Queer Eye, Shark Tank — compete in categories that aren’t awarded during the main Emmys broadcast.
That puts the biggest spotlight each year on the Reality Competition Program category, which has only been won by five shows in 21 years of the category’s existence. My friend Joe Reid pointed this out in a recent column at Vulture, and agrees with me that the category’s original sin may have come in its first year, when The Amazing Race won the inaugural award over the true cultural juggernaut of Survivor.
“If you watch the early aughts Emmys ceremonies, there was a lot of anxiety among actors especially that reality TV was coming to take their jobs,” Joe tells me in a text conversation. “So to have The Amazing Race — a reality competition, yes, but one that could also be sold as a travelogue — beat Survivor that first year was, I think, a vote for snobbery and against the more declasse aspects of early reality TV.”
The awards did evolve a little as reality TV did too. Top Chef won just once but was nominated alongside its Bravo sibling Project Runway many times; American Idol never won but likely paved the way for The Voice to win four times; and by the time RuPaul’s Drag Race began its winning streak in 2018 it marked the full Emmy arrival of the queer reality TV sensibility that Nussbaum describes in a book chapter titled “The Wink.”
But even the vanguards can become the status quo. Although RuPaul’s Drag Race shows no sign of flagging this year, Joe has some ideas for changing things up. At Vulture he proposed limiting the category’s nominees to only first-time contenders, and he and I discussed how a more realistic option might be a rotating jury of voters selecting the nominees each year, reflecting different tastes as a result.
“The Emmys in general have a stagnation problem, and it’s not just in the reality TV categories,” Joe tells me. “In some ways, it’s a human nature thing: You like the shows you like, and it would probably take a lot for you, as a voter, to be swayed from that opinion year-over-year.”
Then again, it’s possible that caring too much about any of this is a sign of a much darker personality trait. I caught up briefly via email with Nussbaum, who is deep in the midst of her book tour, and she pointed out that one of the few mentions of the Emmys in her book comes courtesy of easily the most notorious reality TV star of them all. “In an early Paley Center interview with Trump and Mark Burnett (moderated by Billy Bush, of all people), Trump could not stop griping about how annoyed he was that The Amazing Race beat The Apprentice,” Nussbaum wrote me. “So one person definitely cares about the Emmys!”
