The 74th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards held last Monday was the lowest rated Emmys telecast ever. Less than 6 million American viewers tuned in - a remarkably poor turnout given we are in television’s golden age, featuring hotly contested streaming wars. The TV Academy need to ask themselves some hard questions - Who are they making this event for? And more importantly, what do the results say about where the industry is going?
In what was a relatively safe and predictable night, there were a few genuine surprises. The wins for beloved public school mockumentary Abbott Elementary in the Comedy categories showed that broadcast TV is still relevant in the streaming age. Broadway legend Sheryl Lee Ralph won Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy and gave an all-timer of a speech, with the audience in the room giving her multiple standing ovations. Meanwhile, creator-actor Quinta Brunson also won for Best Writing, but her speech was overshadowed by a badly conceived bit featuring Jimmy Kimmel.
The biggest winner this year was HBO’s The White Lotus, a class satire masquerading as a murder mystery, which took home 10 statuettes including Best Limited or Anthology Series. The show’s creator, Mike White, won in both writing and directing categories. HBO’s other big winner was dark high school drama Euphoria with six wins including a second win for Zendaya in the Lead Actress in a Drama category.
Netflix was right behind with six history-making wins for the Korean-language breakout hit Squid Game. Lee Jung-jae took home Lead Actor in a Drama beating previous winner Succession’s Jeremy Strong, as well as other strong contenders Brian Cox for Succession, and Bob Odenkirk for Better Call Saul. Cult hit Stranger Things continued its run with a haul of five awards at the Creative Arts Emmys (which were given out in a separate ceremony two weeks prior) for its penultimate season.
No awards ceremony is complete without a few egregious snubs. Critical favourite Better Call Saul, AMC’s fantastic spinoff based on a character from the Breaking Bad universe, continued its losing streak, taking it to a total of 46 nominations across its run with zero wins. Fans should note that it still has a chance next year with its final six episodes being eligible for the 2023 window. Other notable disappointments include HBO’s Barry, Hulu’s Only Murders In The Building, and Apple’s Severance, all of which saw some love at the Creative Arts Emmys but were shut out at the main event.
The numbers story
HBO (and its streaming sibling HBO Max) made a roaring comeback this year with 38 wins across both ceremonies, compared to main rival Netflix which took home 26 statuettes in total. It was a far cry from HBO’s dismal showing last year with a mere 19 awards against a record-breaking 44 for Netflix. The overall Disney brand (comprising ABC, Hulu, Disney+, FX, and Nat Geo) also had a strong showing this year with 26 wins, tying with Netflix.
HBO has been a mainstay on the TV awards circuit ever since it first ventured into scripted programming in the late '90s with The Sopranos and Sex And The City. But it's been a tough year for HBO and parent company Warner Bros, what with it being tossed around from one corporate overlord AT&T to another in Discovery. In the last two months, the studio has been through layoffs, cost cuts, and questionable content decisions, resulting in a string of bad PR. HBO's strong showing at the Emmys, in spite of the surrounding turmoil, is a testament to its commitment to content quality and superior storytelling.
Coming up next
After a couple of false starts to expanding the flagship Game of Thrones universe, the currently airing House of the Dragon has been performing well for the network. It remains to be seen if this will translate into awards next year. The studio may have a better chance with the recently announced Jon Snow sequel series, given that it centers a known character, but that show is at least a couple of years away. Nevertheless, HBO has a strong ongoing stable with the likes of Succession, Barry, Hacks, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (in the variety/talk show segment). Awards magnet Euphoria (and Zendaya) will skip a year as the next season will only begin shooting in March to release in time for Emmys 2024. The slack in the Drama category will be taken up by the return of The White Lotus, which will no longer have the cushion of playing in the Limited Series/Anthology branch.
Next year, HBO/HBO Max will also field the highly anticipated video game adaptation The Last of Us starring Pedro Pascal from Emmy-winning Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin. The pipeline continues with Love and Death starring Elizabeth Olsen from veteran TV creator David E. Kelley who previously delivered HBO a huge success with Big Little Lies; and Steven Soderbergh’s Full Circle with Emmy favourite Claire Danes, to name a few. The holding company may change, but the pedigreed content engine never stops with HBO.
The player that is most closely following HBO’s playbook is Apple TV+. For a platform that is less than three years old, with a fraction of the content compared to established players, they have a much higher batting average. Apple TV+ came in with 52 nominations against HBO’s 140 and Netflix’s 105. Emmy darling Ted Lasso will be back next year, along with breakout sci-fi hit Severance. Star-studded The Morning Show stumbled this year, but has enough juice to bounce back, and there are more shows in the pipeline like long-gestating Shantaram which is slated for release in mid-October.
It would be an understatement to say that Netflix had its own share of troubles this year. The streaming giant had a sobering reality check when it lost subscribers for the first time since its launch, sending its stock price crashing. The platform has since had multiple rounds of layoffs (including one the day after the Emmys), numerous show cancellations and budget rationalizations, all in an effort to cut costs. Emmy host Kenan Thompson had a biting joke in his monologue about Netflix joining Squid Game as a contestant next season because it was “in massive debt and desperate for money”. This shift from freely spending while on a growth trajectory, to having to be fiscally responsible as a mature company is a natural evolution, and puts Netflix on the same playing field as its more traditional rivals. This mindset will reflect next year in the form of reduced marketing budgets for awards campaigns. Netflix will have to move on from its “spray and pray” approach and be smarter and more targeted with its content decisions.
This is not to say that Netflix doesn’t have its own killer advantage - the real story of this year’s Emmys is Squid Game racking up a ground-breaking 14 nominations and six wins including heavyweight awards like Lead Actor and Directing for a Drama Series. The Television Academy (much like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences) is a primarily American (read English language) body celebrating American (read English language) work. So Squid Game’s breakthrough is a feat no less stunning than Parasite’s sweep at the Oscars in 2020. This could only be achieved by Netflix - with its global presence and ability to create, identify, and amplify world-class content in other languages. HBO has never had success like this, in spite of multiple forays into non-English shows in other markets. This should serve as a wake-up call to the traditional studios in Hollywood - good content will win out, irrespective of the language barrier. Narcos and Money Heist walked so Squid Game could run. If either of those shows were released today, they likely would have had similar awards recognition. To bring the analogy closer to home, this is Baahubali in 2015, and we know what Bollywood is dealing with in 2022.
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