Let’s get the obvious out
of the way: I’m relatively certain that the current Writers strike and the
impending Actors one will be resolved by the time the Emmys take place in three
months. I know Hollywood extremely well by
now, and the last thing they want is to have one of their biggest nights of
self-congratulation ruined by the fact it might not happen. The studios will come to a compromise that
will make most (but not all) people happy, and when the awards take place all
the winners will go out of their way to thank their unions. This is basically the model that happened in
the last major work stoppage back in 2007 and Hollywood came to a compromise a
month before the Academy Awards were going to happen. So rest assured by early
August at the latest, things will be resolved.
That’s it for business.
Let’s move on to more serious things.
As anyone who has read my column
for the last decade is very aware, the series that will take up the lion’s
share of my blog for the next three weeks is one that I take more seriously
than anything else. Constant readers are
also painfully aware that the aftermath is generally one of outrage mixed with
disappointment. Trying to predict the Emmy nominations is a minefield on the
best days; trying to do so while some of the biggest favorites are the series
you hate the most is even harder.
But look on the bright side
(for me, anyway) Ozark is done and Euphoria is ineligible. A lot of my favorite series are high
favorites in the Drama and Comedy categories and there’s a good chance many of
them will end up winning nominations if not awards. I have been enlightened by
how the final season of Succession played out, so I can deal with its
impending dominance of the nominations with some genuine respect. In the comedy category, the major contenders
for nominations and awards are among my favorite shows of 2023 right now.
Limited Series is always a tricky net to navigate but there have been some very
good ones that I can get behind.
But I will not abandon my
principles. I intend to acknowledge some of my favorite series this season as
possibilities though the chances for nominations, much less awards, are
remote. This approach will be a slightly
more modified one than the one I’ve taken over the last several years with more
pragmatism than optimism. Would I love it if Reservation Dogs and Perry
Mason dominated the nominations this year? Absolutely. I know it probably
won’t happen but I’m going to try and push for the more realistic ones.
The format will be the
same. I will list my favorites among the major categories, while I will also
balance the likely candidates with the ones I’d like to see there. For each
major category, I will make a submission labeled For Your Consideration,
something that is very likely to fall under the radar of the academy. (Then
again, it’s likely the HCA won’t let me down.)
I will start with Drama
this year.
BEST DRAMA
I acknowledge that HBO is
likely to dominate this category as never before and while I’m fine with two of
their major nominations, I can not in good conscious advocate for House of
The Dragon or The Last of Us. My hatred of the franchise that hatched the
former is unquenched, and I simply did not see the latter. I may ended up doing
that before Season 2 begins. I still think there are some HBO series that flew
under the radar that are worth fighting for, and I’m going to try and balance with
some longshots.
Better Call Saul (AMC)
In what may have been the
most impressive piece of work in the last decade, Vince Gilligan brought us to
the end of Jimmy McGill’s saga and showed us where Saul Goodman’s ended. We learned the fate of Kim Wexler and while
we were glad she lived, we were heartbroken that her and Jimmy’s marriage ended
– and that effectively destroyed the last aspects of Jimmy. We saw how Saul managed
to maintain the cover that we thought would be broken in the black and white
footage that had started every previous season – and then the worst part of his
nature made things worse. We saw how Saul got caught and in the series finale,
we saw every point of his life that led to this – and how in the end he did
something that Walter White never did – took responsibility for his actions. In
that sense, the final minutes of the series finale may have given us the happy ending
we never could get. When we finally saw the cameos from so many of the Breaking
Bad regulars in the final episodes they were not Easter eggs but something
the series had genuinely earned. Even at
the end, Gilligan never found a way to stop shocking us (hi, Carol Burnett!)
and he created one of the greatest series of all time. In a perfect world, it
would take the Best Drama prize this year (as it did at the Critics’ Choice
Awards.)
The Crown (Netflix)
With the passing of Queen
Elizabeth prior to the fifth season, there has been a certain backlash against
one of the most prestigious and greatest series in streaming history. People
claim that it’s pro King Charles, pro-Princess Diana, anti-Queen Elizabeth, or
anything else you want to look at. They have all missed the point of what Peter
Morgan has been trying to do and what he continues to do in Season 5.
Just as David Simon used The
Wire to show the collapse of the American Dream, Morgan is using the
monarchy to use the deterioration of Great Britain as a force in the world and
the destruction of the nation. By showing how the now aging Queen Elizabeth and
Prince Philip, who bucked against the system in the first two seasons, are now
fundamentally backing every aspect of the monarchy, they have shown how much of
a prison this system is and how those who are even considered a threat – as Princess
Diana clearly is - deserve nothing but
contempt for doing the same things that they did a generation earlier. Morgan
uses the most rich and powerful to show how broken the class structure is
there. This is not about maligning the memories of the dead, as the
pro-Elizabeth people have claimed. It is about showing how their actions have
permanently affected the culture of the living. It’s also one of the greatest
works of historical drama that television has ever produced.
The Old Man (FX)
There are three masterclasses
of drama that have premiered this decade that demonstrate that the Age of Peak
TV is still alive and well. It’s been nearly a year since The Old Man debuted
in the summer of 2022, but it’s power has not declined. Jeff Bridges survived cancer and Covid to play
one of the most incredible characters in the past decade, a former CIA agent
who has lived in hiding for thirty years and whose past has come back to hunt
him. As he goes on the run, his closest ally Harold Harper is forced to try and
find out why he is being stalked and ends up learning that one of the people he
has trusted his entire life has never been who they said they were. The journey
goes back in time more than forty years, crosses the globe, involves powerful
hitmen, Afghani warlords and women that both men have underestimated. Jeff
Bridges and John Lithgow give performances that will certainly be rewarded with
nominations, but the entire show is one that deserves recognition from the
Academy as it is the kind of work that is features action, drama and that the
past can never go away.
Perry Mason (HBO)
I was disappointed but not
entirely surprised that Perry Mason was cancelled after its second
season. Admittedly there had been somewhat less of a chance there would be a
third one as Matthew Rhys had to be drawn in to do the second in the first
place and had hinted reluctance to return again. This is a shame because the second season
demonstrated just what this show was capable of.
For the first time in a
century Perry Mason was defending a client he knew to be guilty, which turned
the series principle on its head. The writers used this to paint a picture of
Los Angeles during the Depression and to show a world that has not
fundamentally changed in a century. The poor are forever downtrodden, minorities
will always be oppressed and those that hide in the shadows can never truly
have freedom (as we saw in the case of Della Street and Hamilton Burger). Even
the people we truly want to idolize and want to shadow are at the end of the
day capable of being just as horrible as the ones we consider monsters. Even
the happy ending at the end of the season is mooted because we know how the
world works and there is little chance that the rich and powerful will be brought
to justice.
There are going to be a
lot of HBO nominees in this category (see below) but honestly I’d rather see
this one there than House of the Dragon or The Last of Us. It’s more keeping in the mood of the next two series,
a bookend of the world that we see the rich and powerful in. Plus it would be a
fitting tribute to a minor masterpiece.
Succession (HBO)
In the first episode of
the final season of Succession, Logan Roy asks his bodyguard if he
thinks there’s an afterlife. Logan tells him that he thinks this is all we get.
And looking at everything that happened
during not only this season but the entire show, it’s hard to imagine a hell
worse than Waystar Royco.
I admit I spent a lot of
time and energy the last few years denouncing that Succession was
everything I thought was wrong with Peak TV. However, I made sure to leave the door
open that the final season might prove me wrong. Hard to argue with that now. In their last conversation Logan told his
children that they were not serious people.
After he died, they spent the next week proving what we’ve known for
three seasons – Logan was right. In the
final minutes of the series, they finally admitted it to themselves. The cost
was everything – the destruction of their family and marriages, a fascist President possibly coming to power
so that they could gain a momentary advantage to take over their company.
Perhaps America itself will collapse. And at the end of the day, even the
company they had held more important than anything else was completely dissolved.
There were no winners, only losers. But as we know from the start, none of the
Roys were winners.
Am I thrilled that this
series is almost certainly going to dominate the awards this season? No. Does
it deserve to do so? Hard to argue with that given everything that
happened in the final year. The majesty of Conor’s Wedding, an election night
that was so horrible it gave viewers PTSD, a funeral (one that the three
siblings had no part in planning) revealing the bitter truths and that series
finale. I get why so many of us liked
season the Roys suffer all these years. Now that the show is over, fans can
take consolation they’ll spend the rest of their lives doing that. That’s a
happy ending.
The White Lotus (HBO)
I’m still not a hundred
percent sure I agree with this series competing in the Best Drama category and
not the Best Limited Series one. But pretending that it’s not one of the best
shows of the 2022-2023 season is not something I will do. When you win the
Golden Globe for Best Limited Series and the Best Drama Ensemble from the SAG awards,
you’ve clearly crossed a border.
The subject at the center
of this season was sex among the wealthy. We saw two couples engage in what amounted
to a struggle for dominance and came away learning absolutely nothing from it. We saw three male generations of a family come
to discover their roots and learn that they can’t trust each other. Tanya
returned to Italy and spent the entire trip utterly unaware of the danger she
was in, until it was too late. And two sex workers spent their vacation using
all of them to some degree. It was
ridiculously fun – even when Jennifer Coolidge died. I’m hoping that in addition to Coolidge, some of my all-time
favorite actors, among them F. Murray Abraham, Meghann Fahy and the wonderful
Aubrey Plaza score nominations. And for those of you still trying to figure out
who ‘won’ the season this year – trust me, it was the audience.
Will Trent (ABC)
This is my longshot among
the eight nominees as the Emmys have spent the better part of a decade pretending
that broadcast dramas don’t exist. They
did it with Parenthood and Empire; they’re likely to do with Big
Sky. But this procedural was so extraordinarily well done that it’s almost
certainly going to earn a place on my top ten list this year. A brilliant
adaptation of a series of novels by Karin Slaughter, we follow the story of the
title character, an orphan abused in the foster system who has come out the
other side as a brilliant federal agent. Ramon Rodriguez was exceptional from
start to finish, but the entire cast from Erika Christensen to Sonja Sohn, are
doing some of their best work in years. (Their characters are significantly
different from how their portrayed in the novels, but this is a change I can
live with.) This is the kind of series that network television clearly needs and
it’s the kind of series the Emmy needs to recognize.
Yellowjackets (Showtime)
There were some people who
had problems with the second season of the incredible genre-defying series that
aired this spring on Showtime. Those people don’t know what they’re talking
about. At this point, Yellowjackets ranks just ahead of Abbott
Elementary as the best series of 2023. This is the most memorable wildcat
of a show since Lost ended, and it lives up to the hype: the viewer analyzing
every scene that happens, tries to figure out what happened in the past that affects
the present, and is baffled by every twist. Of course, Lost never had
cannibalism, a group of teenage girls or a dream sequence that featured John
Cameron Mitchell as the human incarnation of a parakeet.
Yellowjackets features some of the
greatest actress in history all doing everything in their power to repress the
trauma that has defined their lives. All
of them – both as adult and their teenage incarnations – utterly dominate the
screen every time you see them. Christina Ricci and Melanie Lynskey are certain
to earn Emmy nominations this year, but one could argue just as strongly for
Juliette Lewis as a survivor who has never been able to live and Simone Kissell
as a cult leader who thinks her insanity has made her sane. I’d argue for
nominations for Elijah Wood as a fellow crime-stopper and Warren Kole as Jeff,
the poor husband who understand why his wife is who she is but can’t find a way
to be what she wants.
This is a dazzling and
incredible achievement of television that never stopped surprising me from the
beginning of the season to the last shot. These girls are special. They deserve
all the nods they can get.
For Your Consideration
Alaska Daily (ABC)
I put this series on my
ten best list of 2022. I was disappointed
but not shocked that ABC canceled it this spring. It does not change the fact
that it was a truly masterclass on every level. Hilary Swank gave an exceptional
performance as a New York reporter who takes a job at a failing Alaska
newspaper because no one will hire her. She and a colleague spent the season
trying to find out the killer of an indigenous woman whose death nobody cared
about. This is the kind of series television needed because it told stories we
needed told: how women who aren’t white are considered invisible, how the far
right has weaponized so many of us against the media, how newspaper reporting
is increasingly endangered even though we keep needing it. That it did so on a
broadcast series is extraordinary. In an earlier era the Emmys would have
flooded it with nominations. This is as good a time as any to do so.
Tomorrow, I will make my cases
for the nominees in Outstanding Actor in a Drama.
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