It was the best of times, it was the worst of times and voters had all the time to watch everything.
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As you all know, I love TV. If the Entertainment Olympics were a thing, I feel pretty confident that I’d be a gold medal marathon watcher with the quickest remote control thumb out there. Don’t even try to come for me on this one.
But never in the history of television has there been a more captive audience than you, me and everyone we know over the past six months.
‘Captive’ is the operative word here, as we found ourselves confined to our couches essentially on overnight notice as the coronavirus pandemic ripped through our states and streets (and continues to). We’ve all been in the same proverbial rudderless-boat-with-a-hole-in-the-bottom, as TV and streaming have become America’s main form of entertainment — Emmy voters included.
With production shut down and sets closed, the industry has had all the time in the world to widely sample under-the-radar shows that they might not have had the time to in years’ past. In fact, they were literally given more time to browse and binge, and not at the mercy of forced closures. In the wake of the virus, the Television Academy bumped back the nomination voting window by a little over two weeks (from June 15th to July 2nd), and extended its ‘hanging episode’ eligibility — which gives a pass to shows with final episodes airing after the original May 31st deadline — to June 30th. These moves allowed voters to have a bit of extra breathing room to watch and carefully work through their (very long) ballots.
Finding the culprit behind the seemingly endless ballots isn’t a Jessica Fletcher-style caper (though I’m always down for a Dame Angela cameo): This year saw a 15% boom in submissions over 2019, thanks in no small part to the spring launch of new streamers AppleTV+, HBO Max and Quibi. To keep up with the numbers, the Academy leapt into action and instituted a new ‘sliding scale’ approach to how many nominees are in each category, which will now range from four to eight based on the number of submissions. The two exceptions are Outstanding Comedy and Drama Series, each of which is guaranteed to top-out at eight apiece. Well played, indeed, powers-that-be.
Taking all of this into account, when I zoom out (no, not the video chat kind, boo) and look at how these factors swirl together, I think we can expect this to be the most interesting and diverse roster of Emmy honorees ever… or, at least I hope so.
But before I hit you with my annual Emmy Dream Ballots over the next few days in lead-up to next Tuesday’s nominations announcement, I wanted to take a moment to tip my hat to the big themes and takeaways from the DVR-worthy season that was.
FEMALE-FOCUSED NARRATIVES WERE FRONT-AND-CENTER: Sisters were doing it for themselves this season, with a surge of core stories on high-profile shows that explored the dynamic complexities of the modern female experience.
From sexual assault and harassment (The Morning Show, The Loudest Voice, Unbelievable), to motherhood (Better Things, Little Fires Everywhere, On Becoming a God in Central Florida, The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel), friendship (Insecure, Patsy & Loretta), relationships and sexuality (Mrs. Fletcher, Vida, Love Life, Dickinson, Killing Eve, Normal People), health issues (The Bold Type, This Is Us) and the resistance (The Handmaid’s Tale, Unorthodox), I can’t recall a time when the ladies were so rightfully recognized with such multidimensional, fully fleshed-out arcs in the mainstream.
This seems to me to be the direct pop culture implication of the #MeToo and Women’s March movements that started in 2017 finally finding their way to our screens. And it’s about time, especially since Time’s Up.
HEAD-ON EXPLORATIONS OF MINORITY EXPERIENCES: Like women, no racial group is a monolith, despite the fact that TV has a history of 1) often presenting them as being so, and 2) skimming the surface without getting into real details on the inherently harder, unpaved paths that define their lives and experiences.
This year, though — as the Black Lives Matter movement took hold of the national conversation and prejudice against Asian-Americans spiked in the face of a pandemic that originated in China — ignorance was declared no longer an option, and Hollywood was in lock-step with TV shows that, finally, did better.
Leading the pack of stellar examples are American Son, David Makes Man, Watchmen, Insecure and Self Made, each of which tackled various dimensions of the past and present Black American experience with a specificity and insightfulness that made a big impact. It certainly helped that the representation on-screen reflected that from behind-the-scenes: All of these shows were written, directed and/or produced by Black artists. Word.
Ramy broke new ground in its second season by expanding its religious arc to explore what it means to be a young Muslim in America through the eyes of a relatably flawed protagonist. Similarly, the Mindy Kaling-created Never Have I Ever took us inside an Indian-American teenage girl’s world as she struggles to navigate how her religion and traditional upbringing at home compute with her very California high school life, often to heartwarming effect.
The multigenerational family dynamic was also tapped by Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens, Vida and One Day at a Time to tell beautifully crafted tales tethered to the Asian, Mexican and Cuban-American experience, respectively.
Much more of all of this, please.
MENTAL HEALTH STEPS INTO THE SPOTLIGHT: Hollywood started to chip away at the stigmas surrounding mental health issues head-on in bold new ways this season, with TV presenting empathetic portraits of bipolar disorder (Dave, Euphoria, Insecure, Modern Love, Ozark), paranoid schizophrenia (I Know This Much Is True), dissociative identity disorder (Mr. Robot), autism (The Outsider), major depressive disorder (Normal People) and nervous breakdown (This Way Up).
The breadth, depth and understanding inherent in how these stories were delicately presented worked to educate and destigmatize like never before, and I hope we’re just at the starting line of this kind of important dramatized discussion taking center stage.
POLITICS IN AN ELECTION YEAR? ACTUALLY, KINDA GROUNDBREAKING: Historical and modern political drama from across the ages and genres burst forth this season, just in time for the national conversation around the 2020 presidential election to officially take hold.
From rearview mirror snapshots of the palace intrigue around the reign of great queens (The Queen, The Great, Catherine the Great), to the battle for women’s rights and equality (Mrs. America), immigration (Years and Years) and the cesspool that is modern campaigning (The Loudest Voice, The Politician), every dark shade of the political spectrum was presented with a knife-sharp edge that managed to cut through the endless real-life daily newsfeed while reflecting it back at us. No easy feat, for sure.
REAL AND FICTICIOUS REFLECTIONS ON THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE: TV also tapped into historic and modern political frameworks to dive deep into vivid — and, at times, horrifying — sketches of Jewish life both here and abroad.
With World on Fire (Masterpiece), we got an on-the-ground, inspired-by-history look at the terrors of life in Europe during WWII as the Nazi occupation expanded, while The Plot Against America takes us back stateside to reimagine a country where fascist Charles Lindbergh takes the presidency, and anyone who identifies as being Jewish is in instant danger overnight.
Meanwhile, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels interwove the supernatural to usher us into 1938 Los Angeles that’s infiltrated with Nazis — and Nazi hunters for good measure. That revenge fantasy theme is put downstage center in a spotlight on Hunters, a graphic novel adaptation that follows a group of vigilantes as they root out Nazi evil.
None of this, however, is to be outdone by modern day-set Unorthodox, a reportedly embellished but no less powerful picture of one woman’s escape from the confines of the cultural politics and traditions of her Orthodox Jewish world in the pursuit of fearlessly living her truth.
These historical fantasies and fantastical histories collided with creativity in each case, with artfully acute, timely reminders of where we’ve been, where we can never go again and the promise of what can come.
THE NEW GOLDEN AGE OF THE 30-MINUTE, SINGLE-CAMERA COMEDY: There certainly hasn’t been a dearth of half-hour gems in recent years, but with stalwarts like Schitt’s Creek, Silicon Valley, Modern Family and The Good Place officially calling it a wrap, we were in desperate need of a new wave of smart single-camera comedies.
Thankfully, we got laugh-a-minute tsunami. This was due in large part to the creative programming geniuses at FX (Dave, Breeders, What We Do In the Shadows), HBO (Insecure, Run, The Righteous Gemstones, Curb Your Enthusiasm 2.0) and Netflix (Dead to Me, The Kominsky Method), who took big swings that paid off as they delved into cultural and human themes through deft, well-observed humor.
It’s worth noting that the seeds for the current half-hour comedy renaissance were planted about 15 years ago post-Sex and the City, when the term ‘dramedy’ (not a genre, folks!) bubbled up with the arrival of series featuring anti-heroes the likes of Nurse Jackie, Weeds, The United States of Tara and their contemporaries. The evolution has been a long time in the making, and I’m so glad to have a new class of comedies that tees up all the ‘LOL’ moments — often wrapped in stories with gravity — just when we’ve needed the laughs and emotional release the most.
And on that note, stay tuned to this space tomorrow to find out which of these shows and their performers I think are Emmy-worthy in my Comedy Dream Ballot. Unlike a lot of what’s been going on in 2020, it’ll be a laugh-a-minute (or at least a chuckle-per-category).