Many awards prognosticators expected the drama categories at this year’s Emmys to feature an odd assortment of nominated titles. Consider it a perfect storm of sorts: With the ending of HBO’s Succession (which took the top prize for three of its four seasons) and AMC’s Better Call Saul (which garnered a staggering 53 nominations across its six seasons without a single win) — plus the fact that last year’s strikes forced shows like last year’s drama nominees The Last of Us, Stranger Things, The White Lotus and Yellowjackets to delay production — this year’s contenders for best drama series include only one previous nominee in The Crown, which won the prize in 2021.
While the royal drama from Netflix might be the reigning champ, it’s FX’s Shogun that stands as the strongest frontrunner — a claim it couldn’t make until the network renewed the show, forcing a savvy move from the limited series category to drama. But even if the top prize for drama is a foregone conclusion, the category did manage to offer some surprises beyond its freshmen entries in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem and Prime Video’s Fallout and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Also entering the race for the first time are HBO’s The Gilded Age and Apple TV+’s The Morning Show and Slow Horses — and all three shows are nominated for the first time despite having aired multiple seasons.
There are few strategic rules when it comes to Emmy campaigning, but a buzzy new series certainly has its advantages, particularly when it can gather consecutive Emmy nominations (and wins) for multiple seasons. But just as shows accumulate audiences over many seasons, they can also manage to grab the attention of Academy voters during less competitive years — and while rare, it’s happened at least twice in the past decade: FX’s The Americans earned its first of two best drama nods for its fourth season in 2016, while Prime Video’s The Boys landed one for its second season in 2021.
Even The Gilded Age star Carrie Coon, who earned a best actress nom along with Christine Baranski’s supporting actress nom, had a theory behind the success of the HBO drama’s second season compared to its first. “One of the things that happens with a second season is that you’ve dispatched with all the exposition and so you can jump right into the story,” Coon told THR the day of the noms announcement.
While The Gilded Age is HBO’s lone contender for best drama (somewhat surprising considering the network’s typical Emmys domination), the cabler’s absence was good news for Apple TV+ mainstay The Morning Show. The star-studded drama was one of the streamer’s earliest hits, premiering in tandem with Apple’s launch in November 2019, and many of those stars — including Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell, Billy Crudup, Mark Duplass and Martin Short — earned Emmy noms for their season one performances in 2020 (Crudup won best supporting actor). While Crudup, Marcia Gay Harden and Reese Witherspoon scored nods in 2022 for the show’s second season, The Morning Show itself again was passed over for a drama series nomination. Not only did the show clinch it this year, it also boasts a whopping 10 acting noms, including repeat nods for Aniston, Crudup, Duplass, Harden and Witherspoon, and fresh mentions for supporting players Nicole Beharie, Jon Hamm, Greta Lee, Karen Pittman and Holland Taylor. (Executive producer Mimi Leder also scored her second directing nom for the series.)
Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, nominated for its third season, is more under the radar — and thus a complete Emmys surprise as far as awards experts go, who until this year didn’t have the Gary Oldman-fronted spy thriller on their lists of predictions. (One can only imagine what other wild card could have filled the slot had Shogun not been renewed.) Yet the pedigree of the Oscar-winning Oldman may have helped push this word-of-mouth success into voters’ awareness — not only did Oldman score an Emmy nomination, so did supporting actor Jack Lowden, guest star Jonathan Pryce, director Saul Metzstein and writer Will Smith (Veep).
This phenomenon is hardly limited to the drama categories this year: The third and final season of FX’s Reservation Dogs, a critical darling championed by the likes of THR‘s own Daniel Fienberg, finally broke through with the Academy to earn its first best comedy series nomination. Perhaps more unexpected was the best actor nomination for D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, making the 22-year-old the youngest nominee in his category (and potentially the youngest winner, a record currently held by Michael J. Fox for his 1986 win for Family Ties at 25). And while FX’s What We Do in the Shadows is not a surprise nominee — it’s the show’s third nom for best comedy series — it did score a best actor nomination for Matt Berry, the first acting nod in its five-season run.
When asked why his ensemble has been until now ignored by the Academy, What We Do in the Shadows showrunner Paul Simms gave THR an Occam’s razor kind of hypothesis: “I don’t know. Maybe there’s just too many shows?” It’s as good a theory as any. Even as we slowly move out of the Peak TV era, there are still hundreds of narrative television series on a seemingly endless list of broadcast networks, cable channels and upstart streaming services. That’s thousands and thousands of hours of television, more than any Academy voter (or, I must say, any awards expert) can possibly consume.
That’s potentially one public service that the Emmys can provide: a shortlist of the best shows on television that viewers can accept, within reason, as the best of the best on TV. But even the Academy doesn’t always get it right from the very beginning — just look at Pop TV’s Schitt’s Creek, which didn’t earn a single Emmy nomination until its fifth season in 2019 (it would lose to another show that earned its first nom for its second and final season: Prime Video’s Fleabag). A year later, the show won best comedy series and swept the acting categories, cementing Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy as one of television’s great ensembles — and proving that sometimes Emmy domination is all about the long game.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
