What To Look For At The 2018 Emmys

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Well well well, it’s Emmys time again. The 70th annual awards take place this coming Monday, September 17. We’ve already given you the list of nominees and the winners we’d like to see. Now, we’ll give you some highlights to look out for during the show. The biggies, the themes, etc. And I, your guide through this exercise, won’t even mention once how infuriating it is that The Good Place wasn’t nominated. Nope, won’t even bring it up. Because I am a professional. Kind of. I am kind of a professional.

Before we dive in, a reminder: This business of giving out awards to art and artists based on purely subjective criteria is all very silly. Important to the people involved, but silly as a whole enterprise. Our stance on it remains as follows: If we’re all going to insist on doing this, let’s try to do it right.

Away we go.

Game of Thrones is nominated for a zillion things in a half-zillion categories, which is interesting because the most recent season of the show aired in mid-2014. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think four-year-old seasons of television should be allowed to compete agai-… hold on. I’m just looking this up again and it appears the most recent season ended in August 2017, not 2014. That’s only one year ago. That feels… impossible. It feels like it aired before the final season of Justified, somehow. And yet! It didn’t! It just barely missed the submission cutoff for 2017 Emmys. Which is how we ended up here, I guess.

And it’s weird! Last year’s Emmys took place three weeks after the finale of television’s biggest and most-lauded show but everyone had to more or less pretend the show didn’t exist. This year’s Emmys take place over a year since that last episode and a good 7-10 months before the next one and we’re all going to try to get hyped up about dragon-related things we barely remember. It’s going to be weird if the show does win Outstanding Drama because other shows on the list feel fresher. But it’s also going to be weird if it doesn’t because it will feel like the show got punished by the calendar.

There’s not really a great solution here, either. A line has to be drawn somewhere even if it makes things weird, like how in Little League you can have one kid who snuck in under the age cutoff and turned 13 midseasons and is shaving on the bench between innings. You just gotta grin and bear it and watch him mash dingers.

Do you like topical jokes I hope you do! Because they are coming whether you like them or not!

This year’s ceremony is hosted by Weekend Update co-hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che, which breaks the recent tradition of just having your network’s late-night host do it by, uh, just having your weekend late-night hosts do it. The two are very used to making jokes about the news and there is a lot of news. Too much news, some would say. This week alone we’ve seen Les Moonves booted out of CBS and a former Weekend Update host go on an apology tour for saying things he shouldn’t have said. It’s going to be hard to avoid a lot of that and there’s a really fine line to tip-toe down if you choose to try.

And on that note: Jost and Che’s Update jokes have a bit of a sharper edge to them than jokes by a Seth Meyers or Jimmy Fallon or Conan, but the question is whether they’ll tweak that Saturday-at-midnight sensibility for a Monday-in-tuxedos type of event. And also why we don’t just make Tina Fey and Amy Poehler host all of these. Or swerve hard to left and get Desus and Mero to do it. We have options, is my point.

I don’t know. It will probably be fine. I’m sure it will be fine. Unless it isn’t. In which case, pitchforks at dawn, I guess

The Americans is one of the best television shows of the last decade or so and it has won jack squat. This is its last chance and it has nominees in the big categories: Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Lead Actor, Outstanding Lead Actress. I would very much like to see it take home at least one of those, in part because you could make the argument that it’s deserving in each category, and in part because that way we can look back 10 years from now and be on the right side of history. Let’s do it. Let’s give The Americans an Emmy.

Looking at the categories, I’d guess the best shot the show has is Matthew Rhys for Lead Actor. I doubt the Emmys are going to do an about-face and suddenly give Outstanding Drama to a show that’s been largely ignored for most of its run. And while Keri Russell freaking rules and should win dozens of awards just for being great, that Lead Actress category is stacked, man. Elisabeth Moss, Sandra Oh, Claire Foy… I mean, damn. The Lead Actor category just features two This Is Us stars (feels like that ship has sailed), two Westworld stars (God bless Jeffrey Wright but he has nothing to do on that show), and Jason Bateman from Ozark (more like No-zark).

We can give Matthew Rhys this Emmy.

LET’S GIVE MATTHEW RHYS THIS EMMY.

LET’S LET HIM BE HAPPY.

Have you glanced at the nominees for Outstanding Comedy lately. Hoo boy.

Atlanta

Barry

Black-ish

Curb Your Enthusiasm

GLOW

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Silicon Valley

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Here’s how deep this group is: The shows I don’t want to win this year — Curb, Silicon Valley, Kimmy — are three of my favorite comedies. It’s crazy. The world has somehow backed me into a position where I’ll be disappointed if Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt wins an Emmy. I really did not see that one coming.

And here’s how good Atlanta is: Even in a category loaded with my favorite shows, including Barry and GLOW, both of which I love for very different reasons, I’ll be blown away if Atlanta doesn’t win.

I’m not exactly breaking news here but do you realize Julia Louis-Dreyfus has won this award every year since 2012 That’s a lot of years and a lot of trophies. And, even as a charter member of the Amy Poehler Should Have More Trophies Of Any Kind, Just Give Her A Lot Of Trophies club, I’m not going to quibble over any of those wins. No quibbling here. Not from me. Find another quibbler.

But.

Due to a delay in Veep’s schedule related to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s cancer treatment, she is not on the ballot this year. And while the bigger issue here is obviously that she gets healthy and returns to collecting Emmy awards in wheelbarrows, it does mean we’ll have a new winner for the first time since Melissa McCarthy won for being in Bridesmaids while also being on Mike & Molly. Here’s the field.

Pamela Adlon (Better Things)

Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)

Tracee Ellis Ross (Black-ish)

Allison Janney (Mom)

Lily Tomlin (Grace and Frankie)

Issa Rae (Insecure)

There’s a lot going on there. It’s a super-diverse group across age and race and experience and I honestly don’t know what to expect. It’s a whole new world. Unless they just freeze up and accidentally give it to Julia Louis-Dreyfus again, out of pure muscle memory. We can’t rule that out here. Not yet.

Stranger Things picked up some nominations. That’s cool. It’s cool not only because Stranger Things is fun and good and I like to see fun and good things get recognized, but also because these awards — especially lately — tend to go to very dark and brooding and serious shows. It’s nice to see something like this crack through, even if it doesn’t win. Mix it up a little.

(There’s a flip side to this argument that goes something like “there were better dramas this year and this show only got nominated because it’s popular and the Emmys wanted the ratings blah blah blah.” And sure, you can burn all the calories you want yelling that into the sun this weekend. But even if that’s all this is, a point I’m only conceding for illustration purposes only, then… good Yeah, good. Throw some fun and popular shows in there. Better that than three more versions of Bleak City: The Night Lingers or whatever the hell.)

Anyway, I don’t expect it to win Outstanding Drama. And Millie Bobbie Brown is up against half the cast of Handmaid’s Tale and Vanessa Kirby so that’s some tough sledding, too. But look at Best Supporting Actor.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones)

Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones)

Mandy Patinkin (Homeland)

David Harbour (Stranger Things)

Matt Smith (The Crown)

Joseph Fiennes (The Handmaid’s Tale)

Harbour can win that. Harbour should win that, to be honest, both because he’s good and because he benefits from Thrones fatigue and Prince Philip on The Crown being a damn drip. Let’s give the Emmy to everyone’s cool dad.

Henry Winkler has never won an Emmy. Neither has Kenan Thompson. They’re both nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy.

Let’s give it to both of them. I’m not joking.

Oh, man. I really must stress how much you do not have to care about this. People inside the industry have to care because it’s directly related to their jobs. People like me are supposed to kind of care because it makes for semi-interesting post-Emmy bullet points to toss in a rundown. But you, the normal person whose brain has not been warped by years of reading headlines lines “Streamers Win Big As Cablers Take A Tumble” and knowing exactly what it means, absolutely do not have to care. Please don’t. Don’t be the guy who knows how many awards HBO won as a company. Don’t let us fool you into thinking you should. Rooting for your favorite show is like rooting for a sports team. That’s fine! Rooting for a network or streaming service is like saying you root for “the National League East.” It’s madness.

It’s too late for me. Save yourself.

The 2018 Emmy Awards will air Monday, September 17th at 8 pm EST.