After each Emmys, it’s de rigueur to put in writing about reveals that have been “snubbed.” However let’s put it in perspective: If “The Bob Newhart Show” by no means gained an Emmy, why do you have to?
Then once more, why didn’t CBS’ Seventies sitcom ever win an Emmy? Or “The Wire,” for that matter? Or “Better Call Saul,” “New Girl,” “Parks and Recreation,” “My So-Called Life,” “Better Things,” “The Good Place,” “BoJack Horseman” and quite a few different beloved reveals?
In lots of instances, reveals shut out on the Emmys have stood the take a look at of time, if not the take a look at of voters on the time. So why do some sequence — together with still-eligible titles like “NCIS,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Yellowstone” — fall by the cracks?
It occurs on the Academy Awards too, in fact. “But with the Oscars, you only have one crack at it — if something else got the momentum, there’s nothing you can do,” says Jason Lynch, curator at New York’s Paley Heart for Media. “For TV, theoretically, if something goes for several seasons, you get multiple cracks at it, so if a series still hasn’t received any Emmys, that discrepancy is more glaring and apparent. You can’t just say that was a crazy year.”
Bob Odenkirk in “Better Call Saul.”
(Greg Lewis / AMC / Sony Photos Tv)
“Better Call Saul” is a vivid instance. “It went 0 for 53 nominations,” Lynch says. “There was this drumbeat, the final season, where journalists are reminding Emmy voters, ‘This is your last chance, please’” — to no avail.
That’s one other means the Emmys differ from the Oscars, notes Irving Belateche, professor of the observe of cinematic arts at USC. “With the Oscars, you can point to times when people finally get a kind of career award, even if it’s not for that role or that film. In the Emmys, they don’t do that, where they say, ‘Let’s finally give “Better Call Saul” a win.’ That, I don’t perceive.”
Then once more, Belateche provides, the sequence was up in opposition to stiff competitors: “‘Game of Thrones’ four times and ‘Succession’ twice. There are so many good, popular shows you’re competing against, it’s not so cut and dried.” Equally, “The Bob Newhart Show” confronted off in opposition to “All in the Family,” “MASH” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Nonetheless, even robust fields can’t clarify away the Emmys’ remedy of “The Wire” — typically listed among the many best TV reveals of all time — which not solely by no means gained in 5 seasons however was solely nominated twice. “And ‘Parks and Recreation’ is absolutely one of the top three comedies of the 21st century,” Lynch says. “To never win a single Emmy is unfathomable.”
A clown lies on a sofa and tells his issues to American comic and actor Bob Newhart, who performs a psychiatrist in “The Bob Newhart Show,” 1972.
(CBS Picture Archive / Getty Pictures)
Style bias is one other concern, Belateche says. “That worked against some of the shows that were overlooked, like ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’” Though “Buffy” did win two Inventive Arts Emmys, for make-up and music composition, it was up in opposition to episodes of “The Sopranos” and “The West Wing” — the kind of status dramas that historically do nicely with voters — when it was nominated in 2000 for writing.
“Sometimes the format and the tone work against it,” says Belateche. “Obviously that’s true of ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.’” Set to premiere its seventeenth season in July, “Sunny” has acquired solely three nods for stunt coordination. “It’s super quirky and really popular among the younger crowd, like my students.” “BoJack Horseman’s” six surreal seasons likewise yielded simply three nods.
The nomination course of itself can current a problem. “You’re only submitting one episode,” Lynch factors out. “When we’re thinking about award-worthy performances, we’re thinking about entire seasons, or multiple seasons, but a voter is only watching whatever episode is submitted, which could be a great showcase for a scene or two but is not giving you all the context you need to appreciate that show. And I don’t know how to fix that. To their credit, the Television Academy has tried. Every couple of years they do change the voting procedures, and sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t.”
Plus, voters could lack a lot time to give attention to something however their very own work: “If you ask showrunners and producers what they’re watching, they say, ‘I’m so busy I don’t have time to watch anything.’ That’s a problem as well,” says Lynch.
Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope and Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson within the pilot episode of “Parks and Recreation.”
(Mitch Haddad / NBCUniversal through Getty Pictures)
“The other thing that we’ve seen, even more so the past couple of years, is that Emmy voters are often reflexively voting for whatever they voted for the previous years,” he provides. “Something like a ‘Modern Family’ was winning every year. And now we’re getting a lot of sweeps, which became most apparent in 2020 when ‘Schitt’s Creek’ ran the board. It’s harder for other shows to get in there when you have only a small handful of shows hoovering up all of the awards.” And if reveals don’t rating wins early of their run, it’s all of the more durable for them to interrupt by later.
Lynch would like to see a means for TV Academy members to vote for reveals as soon as they’re clearly seen as a part of the pantheon. “It’s only time that’s going to give you that sense of a show’s legacy. But this is a TV business; nobody’s going to watch an Emmy show in 2025 that’s giving away trophies to shows from 2015.”
Then once more, the Emmys’ Governors Award has sometimes been given to reveals, and the whole “Star Trek” franchise gained a Governors Award in 2018 in recognition of its lasting influence, lastly celebrating that first Emmy-less sequence (together with six others). There could also be hope for “The Wire” but.
