There are many reasons Kareem Rahma is happy about his first-ever Emmy nomination, and why he and his SubwayTakes executive producer, Andrew Kuo, were drinking afternoon martinis when I caught them on the phone last week, a few hours after the nominations were announced. It’s the first nomination for a YouTube original series since the tech giant started aggressively pushing its shows for Emmys last year, a moment that Rahma called “a milestone for the entire creator community” in his official reaction statement. It’s also, very importantly for Rahma, not yet another Webby.
“What we do is not Webbys,” says Rahma, who has been nominated for three of the internet-focused awards. “It’s entertainment; it’s television. I want to be recognized by the right people.”
Alongside political song parodist Randy Rainbow, whose show has now been nominated six times in the short-form categories, Rahma is part of what feels like a slow-moving sea change at the Emmys, where entirely independent shows born on YouTube will become increasingly competitive with traditional Hollywood productions. Sure, Hot Ones and Royal Court didn’t manage to break through in the best variety series category, and many of the short-form nominees are still spinoffs from network-produced shows — like Colbert Before Air or Inside the Pitt. But the SubwayTakes nomination proves the value of the work Rahma and YouTube did to explain to voters that creators aren’t just whipping out their iPhones and recording on the fly. These are full-fledged productions — and Emmy-worthy as a result.
“It’s honestly been really great to educate and inform the general public about what goes into making these shows,” Rahma tells me. He previously worked at The New York Times in the mid-2010s and says he had a similar experience there while on the publication’s digital transformation team. “Much of it was just educating people about how the internet works,” he says. “You can’t just go, ‘I’m gonna make a video.’ You have to get a team and get a producer and actually look at it as a job.”
I ask Rahma whether the shift to include creators at the Emmys feels as inevitable as the digital transformation that has now fully taken over the media landscape. “It’s inevitable in terms of innovation and progress,” he responds. “It’s not inevitable in terms of gatekeepers — and there are still gatekeepers that exist. In my heart, it was always inevitable, but I always knew that we were up against these challenges.”
That’s more or less how change usually happens at the Emmys, where one breakthrough nomination — say House of Cards getting the first drama series nomination for a streamer in 2013, or Arrested Development becoming the first single-camera comedy winner in 2004 — predicts where the future is headed. SubwayTakes is the big sea change nominee among this year’s lineup, but there were still other breakthrough nominations all over the place if you know where to look for them. Read on for four others.
First-Time Nominees
With so many acting categories, the Emmys are a great place for hardworking character actors or rising stars to finally get their moment in the spotlight, and many of them are frank about just how much the recognition means to them. “This is all very, very new for me,” confessed Karolina Wydra, nominated for her supporting turn in Pluribus, when I talked to her last week. She made sure to credit the show’s casting department, which had remembered her from previous auditions before she took several years off to raise her sons, now 3 and 5. “I am here because of them.”
The Pitt star Sepideh Moafi called the moment “so humbling” when I spoke to her last week. Still, she also made it clear, “This is certainly not why we do what we do.” Her co-star Taylor Dearden opened her reaction statement by saying, “I am so lucky to be employed in the first place.” Meanwhile, Wydra’s Pluribus co-star Carlos Manuel Vesga, whose career had been almost entirely in his native Colombia before the Apple show came calling, said it was “beyond imagination that this show could come my way.”
There’s probably no better breakthrough storie story in the past year than Connor Storrie’s, who wasn’t eligible for an Emmy nomination for Heated Rivalry but still made it in as a guest actor for hosting Saturday Night Live. His reaction statement included the same word you see from a lot of first-time nominees: “surreal.”
Big Swings That Connected
A lot of the shows nominated for Emmys this year took huge creative gambles, from the secretive sci-fi premise of Pluribus to the bold tonal mix of Widow’s Bay to the cutthroat generational warfare of Beef. But I was especially happy to see two shows rewarded for doing something different, in hopes they’ll get to do more of it. The Muppet Show, Seth Rogen’s single-episode revival of the classic series, still hasn’t been officially picked up for a full season — but maybe its six Emmy nominations will help convince the execs at Disney that moving forward with more is worth it. Elsewhere in the Disney portfolio, the unexpected Gen Z ratings success of Dancing With the Stars helped the show get its first nomination for outstanding reality competition series in a decade. Both The Muppet Show and Dancing With the Stars, in their own ways, prove that old formats can find new life with just a bit of extra creative thinking. More of that on our televisions, please!
Good Shows Not Forgotten
Even with so many Emmy categories to choose from, something great almost always gets left out — this year, that dubious honor belongs to FX’s The Lowdown, HBO’s Industry and, most heartbreaking for me personally, NBC’s The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins. But if you scroll through some of the smaller technical categories, you catch a few titles that may have deserved better, but at least get to call themselves Emmy nominees forever. The outstanding title design category is especially good on this front, including Peacock’s already-canceled (and very good!) Ponies, Apple’s Smoke and Prime Video’s Young Sherlock. All three are lone nominees. The choreography category also made room for shows that probably deserved better, with nods for ABC’s hit procedural Will Trent and the NBC comedy Stumble, which I kept hearing good things about but which is sadly also already canceled. It makes sense for the same handful of shows to dominate in a lot of these categories — there are a lot of places to nominate The Pitt! — but special credit to the voters who seem especially eager to spread the wealth.
Lone Acting Nominees
Getting just one Emmy nomination is a kind of achievement, but having one of those nominations be a major acting prize is on another level entirely — and sometimes, it’s hard to even understand how it happened. Why did Emmy voters completely forget about The Morning Show — which earned 11 nominations for acting alone for its third season — but still make room for Billy Crudup in supporting actor? How do they go nuts for The Handmaid’s Tale but only include star Chase Infiniti for the spinoff, The Testaments? Why did they ignore the excellent crafts and writing of Wonder Man but still give Yahya Abdul-Mateen II that surprising (and well-deserved) lead actor nomination? And truly, how on Earth is this the second year in a row that Netflix’s starry comedy The Four Seasons has been acknowledged only with a supporting actor nod for Colman Domingo?
Two of these sole nominees, though, can see their nominations as credit for much of the other work they did on their shows. Half Man creator Richard Gadd couldn’t replicate the huge Emmy success he had with his previous autobiographical series, Baby Reindeer, but his nomination for supporting actor in a limited series is evidence he’s still in the Emmy club. And Riz Ahmed has been frank about how much time he spent developing the deeply personal limited series Bait. His nomination for best lead actor in a limited series may be less than the show deserves, but if they had to pick just one category, that’s the right one.
