It’s Emmy nominations day again—yes, just six months after January’s awards telecast. The 2023 ceremony was postponed to 2024 due to the overlapping actors’ and writers’ strikes that brought Hollywood to a standstill throughout the summer and fall. But it’s the new slate of Emmy nominees that reflects last year’s atypically scant TV output, which is also a result of the ongoing contraction of the streaming industry, driven by the financial sector’s impatience to see its enormous investments in the original-content arms race finally turn a profit. As the business reshapes itself, for the umpteenth time in the past decade, to accommodate new economic constraints, it’s worth considering what this year’s Emmy nominations say about the state of TV.
1. Shōgun dominated the drama series nominations—by defying the austerity logic of the post-consolidation streaming industry.
FX’s Shōgun is today’s biggest winner, with 25 total nominations, including best drama series, recognition for two of its leads—Anna Sawai and Hiroyuki Sanada—and several supporting and guest actor nods. Which makes sense. A historical epic of swords, ships, and samurai that drew huge audiences, Shōgun is exactly the kind of series the Emmys love to celebrate. Plus, it happens to be the year’s best show to date.
In the works since the late 2010s, it’s also a meticulously crafted, extremely expensive holdover from streaming’s profligate era, when even the silliest genre series were granted Game of Thrones-level budgets. (Remember Apple’s god-awful Jason Momoa vehicle, See?) Which makes it a rarity half a decade later, as executives desperate to cut content costs reserve the biggest bucks for franchise fare and video-game adaptations with guaranteed audiences while filling out their libraries with cheap reality and lifestyle programming. Shōgun’s commercial, critical, and now awards-season success—following a run that convinced FX to renew it for a second season even though it was conceived as a miniseries—should send a message to Hollywood that ambitious bets can still pay off, both creatively and financially. Not every show merits eight-figure episodic budgets and years of development, but the ones that do are worth a dozen dumb superhero sequels. Given its trajectory, producers must be clamoring to create the next Shōgun. Here’s hoping the suits hearing their pitches are sharp enough to spot it.
2. When it comes to prestige drama, HBO might no longer be the brand to beat.
For the past quarter-century, as The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire gave way to Succession and the Game of Thrones franchise, HBO has been TV’s gold standard for drama. Last year, in a relatively typical showing, the brand boasted four out of eight drama series nominees, with Succession going on to sweep just about every category where it was up for an award. But in 2024, the network’s only drama series nominee is The Gilded Age—a fun, silly historical soap that nobody actually thinks is one of the best shows out there. HBO’s solid franchise revival True Detective: Night Country, did lead the limited series category with 19 nominations.
There are certainly external explanations for the scarcity of HBO titles among this year’s nominations. Amid writers’ and actors’ strikes, three of 2023’s drama series nominees—The Last of Us, The White Lotus, and House of the Dragon—failed to produce a season during this eligibility period; the fourth, Succession, ended last May. The Emmys also overlooked HBO’s stunning adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer—which is, in my estimation, as strong a limited series as any that actually got nominated. (Seriously, Lessons in Chemistry?)
Yet other platforms have had the same production delays and TV Academy whims to weather. So it seems fair to ask if we’re starting to see the penny-pinching, populist agenda Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav brought to the mega-company’s suite of TV brands—including a Discovery stable built on such thrifty lifestyle networks as TLC, HGTV, and Food Network—chip away at its most prestigious purveyor of original programming. Last year, HBO Max became Max; now, there’s reason to worry that the name change was more than a symbolic gesture.
3. Second-tier streamers and cable networks are falling off the radar.
Among the major categories whose nominees were announced in Wednesday’s telecast, Peacock earned just one nod—for its wonderful reality competition The Traitors. Showtime was widely expected to get some recognition for its brilliantly weird Nathan Fielder satirical thriller The Curse, but in the end it, too, came away with a single major nomination, for Matt Bomer’s lead performance in the underrated miniseries Fellow Travelers. Showtime’s sister brand Paramount+, along with cable stalwarts AMC and Starz, got shut out of the big categories entirely. For pay-TV platforms that are supposed to attract subscribers by producing premium product, this seems like a problem. It’s also a sign of times when mergers and declining revenue have led to industry titans like Netflix, Disney, WBD, and Amazon eroding smaller competitors’ market shares. Of the two relatively niche brands that did make a strong showing in this year’s noms, one—FX—is a Disney subsidiary and the other—Apple TV+—is overspending on celebrity-packed projects thanks to a parent company with bottomless pockets.
4. Genre shows have become the freshest dramas on TV.
The Crown. The Gilded Age. The Morning Show. Yawn! In a post-Succession world, the starry, talky ensemble dramas that secured predictable slots among this year’s nominees feel a bit stale. More exciting has been the rise of a new generation of genre fare that’s immersive like Shōgun, witty like the post-apocalyptic game adaptation Fallout, self-aware like the action dramedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith, unapologetically cerebral like the sci-fi spectacle 3 Body Problem. (Although, if we’re being honest, I’d still rather groan my way through The Morning Show than watch the final nominee, Star Wars spin-off Ahsoka.) If TV execs are resigned to pander to spectacle-hungry audiences by prioritizing genre shows over realistic dramas, at least some of what they’re greenlighting is worth watching.
5. We could use some great new comedies.
It was, in many ways, a good round of nominations for comedy. Reservation Dogs, one of TV’s best shows in any genre for its entire run, which ended last year, finally scored nods in the series and lead actor categories (though where is Devery Jacobs’ lead actress nom?). But, like Rez Dogs, Curb Your Enthusiasm was nominated for its final season. What We Do in the Shadows is slated to end with its upcoming sixth season. Abbott Elementary, The Bear, Hacks, and Only Murders in the Building all have three seasons under their belts. And the only debut series on the list is Palm Royale, a funny, star-packed but slight soap that divided critics. Comedy has gotten short shrift on TV of late. Whether it comes from networks, streamers, or cable, there’s room for some great new stories in the genre to shake up the current status quo.
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