Before I get to the final
entry for drama, an apology. In my predictions for Best Actor and Best Actress
in a Drama, I erroneously gave predictions for seven nominees in each category.
Apparently I made this same mistake last year. There will only be six eligible
nominees for Best Actress and Actor in a Drama.
Forced to edit one out, I would say that Ramon Rodriguez and Christine
Baranski would be moved to the FYC categories instead of the leads from So
Help Me Todd. (Which was another error on my part; apparently it’s being
considered as a comedy by the Emmys. Who knew?) However, there are still eight
slots for Supporting Actor and Actress in a Drama, so my previous list remains
intact as will my list for Supporting Actress.
If you still trust me
after these mistakes, here are my choice in the last category.
OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING
ACTRESS IN A DRAMA
This is probably the only
category where there may not be a nominee from Succession. With Sarah
Snook competing in the Best Actress category, the only possibility remaining is
J. Smith Cameron and it may require more than institutional laziness to get
this formidable performer in.
It seems far more likely
this category will feature several nominees from The White Lotus including
the current overwhelming favorite this category. But, much as I love Jennifer Coolidge, it
remains to be seen whether she will manage the nearly impossible feat of
leaping from Limited Series to Drama. I
suspect this category will be dominated by three dramas that are feature some
of the best female performers of the year. So let’s get started.
Carol Burnett, Better
Call Saul
Apparently Carol Burnett’s
granddaughter had an appearance on The X-Files nearly a quarter of a
century ago. That is how Burnett got to know Vince Gilligan. Did Gilligan write
this role for her or did Burnett have ‘make an appearance in the Breaking
Bad universe’ on her bucket list? Who knows? Who cares. Because in what may have been the biggest
surprise from a writer that never stops having to surprise us, the final act of
Saul Goodman played out in black and white where Saul found himself running a
con to save himself involving Burnett’s character, became involved with her
family to help herself – and in the last moment, it was Burnett who became the
act who ended up bringing Saul down. (By the way, I understand that Vince
Gilligan wanted Saul to kill Carol Burnett and Bob Odenkirk argued against it.
Good for Bob.) At ninety Burnett revealed depths as a dramatic actor that truly
continue to amaze. She was a surprise nominee for Supporting Actress for the
Critics Choice awards; it won’t be one when she gets a nomination later on.
Jennifer Coolidge, The
White Lotus
Coolidge is clearly the
odds on favorite in this category. There doesn’t seem to have been an award she
hasn’t won for this or in a different category. The Golden Globes gave
her an award for Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series. The Critics
Choice gave her Best Supporting Actress in a Drama. The SAG awards gave her
Best Female performance in a drama (thank you for beating Zendaya, by the way).
Even the MTV awards gave a prize to her for Best Frightened Performance, which
considering that all the other actors were in horror films really speaks
to how great Coolidge was in this role.
Reluctant as I am to see
Coolidge in this category, it is hard to argue she isn’t worthy of another
nomination. She was the only recurring
character between the first and second season of The White Lotus, which
has put in this pickle to begin with. But really, who wouldn’t want to spend
another season in the company of the utterly clueless and hysterical Tanya? A
woman who brings her personal assistant on a romantic getaway (“it’s not like
she’ll be in our bed” she tells her husband”) Then she drags poor Portia throughout
out Venice, inspires the devotion of a group of people she shouldn’t trust only
to find out ‘the gays are planning to kill me’ . I was shocked to see Tanya end
up prevailing against them, and kind of sorry she died, but really she made the
most of her hysterical exit.
There is someone else in
this category who I badly want to win (we’ll get to her) but does anyone object
if Coolidge wins again? I wouldn’t.
Elizabeth Debicki, The
Crown
It could not have easy for
Debicki to step into the shoes that Emma Corrin filled so magnificently in the
fourth season of The Crown as a young princess Diana. Corrin took the
Golden Globe, the Critics Choice and the inaugural prize for Best Actress from
the HCA in 2021. So it is a credit to Debicki
that she chooses to fight her own path throughout Season 5 while still maintaining
the sympathy the viewer felt for her throughout. We watched as her marriage finally dissolved,
as she began a war against the royal family, as she finally divorced Charles
and began to find happiness with Dodi. It was a brilliant, mesmerizing work, all
with the inevitable pangs that came as the season came closer to Diana’s inevitable
fate. Debicki has herself managed to earn a Golden Globe and SAG nomination for
her work as Diana. It is an inevitability that a nomination for Best Supporting
Actress will follow.
Meghann Fahy, The White
Lotus
A nice bonus of the second
season of The White Lotus was that it has finally made it relatively
certain that two of my favorite actresses of the past decade, who have received
no recognition from any awards show despite each starring in one of the greatest
series of that era, are near certainties for Emmy nominations this year. I’m
not sure who I’m happier for, but I’ll start alphabetically.
Meghann Fahy was a delightful
presence as an enterprising twenty-something trying to find a path at a women’s
magazine as a fashion designer, to find romantic bliss with the man she loved,
and the greatest female friendship I saw in the 2010s. It says a lot that even
in the previews for the second season, I did not recognize Fahy because Sutton
was smart, savvy and utterly loyal and Daphne…well, wasn’t. She seemed ridiculously
clueless about everything, was perfectly willing to be nice to her husband’s
friends in private and talk down to them in public, and her reaction to her husband’s
infidelity was to possibly have one of her own. (Not even Fahy is sure.) Fahy
was just hysterical to watch throughout this series. I don’t know if we’ll see
Daphne in the third installment of The White Lotus, but I know that I
want to see her again and for Fahy to get the recognition she’s been owed for
five years.
Sammi Hanratty, Yellowjackets
It’s not easy to choose a representative
among the brilliant teenagers who play the survivors on this series. Perhaps I
am going to far by choosing Hanratty, who plays the younger version of Misty on
the series – any of the other young performers could serve just as well. But I’m
not choosing her at random. Just as Ricci is one of the standout performers on
the series for her portrayal of Misty, Hanratty
is spectacular playing Misty as a nerdy loser so desperate to be liked and have
friends, she destroyed the black box to stop them from being rescued – and when
she finally confided in someone on it, the betrayal and hurt was so immediate
she killed her. Hanratty shows so many more emotions than we see in the adult
Misty while still revealing that she is the same person we will see when she is
grown up. There is clearly a monster in her, but there’s still someone who
desperately wants to have friends, to be part of the group, but who will never earn
acceptance. Any of the young performers
could be her, and I could just as easily advocate for Simone Kissell or Lauren
Ambrose. But Hanratty is such a joy to watch that I hope that, like the
character she plays on the series, she will find recognition.
Aubrey Plaza, The White Lotus
Now Plaza is definitely
getting her due, and honestly she has been owed, if anything, more than Fahy
is. Like the entire cast of Parks and Rec, she received a single Emmy
nomination for her utterly deadpan work as April, some believed she should have
gotten a nomination for her work on the cult hit series Legion (unseen
by me) and as anyone who has watched the Independent Spirit awards knows, she
is one of the best awards shows hosts in history. Now it is her time. She
deservedly received a Supporting Actress nomination for her work as Harper, the
eternally grumpy wife brought along on a couples trip with a couple she hates
and a husband she’s not having sex with. She spends much of the series being dragged
around by Daphne, unaware whether her husband is being unfaithful, being hit on
not very subtly by her husband’s college roommate and their marriage seems to fall
apart. The fact that they have sex in their final scene does nothing to make us
think that they are any happier.
Plaza has already stolen
the hearts of America with her delightful presentation at the SAG awards this February
(Jenna Ortega, your time is coming too) and her incredible stint as host of SNL
in January makes her a strong possibility for Best Guest Actress in a
Comedy. And I’ll be honest: if someone from The White Lotus has to win
this year, I really want it to be Aubrey Plaza. Coolidge already has an Emmy and
a shelfful of trophies for her work as Tanya. Let’s let Aubrey get her too. I’d
like to see if she can manage an acceptance speech and stay completely deadpan.
Christina Ricci, Yellowjackets
Ricci is one of several
performers this year who has a legitimate possibility of being recognized in
two different categories. (I’ll deal with her when I get to comedy.) But few
people who saw her performance as Misty in Yellowjackets can argue that
this is another one of those roles you realistically can’t see anyone else
playing. Misty used her insanity in Season 2 on a relentless mission to find
Natalie, while trying to cover up her role in the murder of Adam. Every scene
she did this year was, as always, a tour de force. From every interaction she had
with Elijah Wood in the first half of the series, to her decision to join the
cult her best friend was in to ‘rescue her’ to her sensory deprivation tank ‘trip’
which is clearly one of the high points of Season 2 (words can not describe how
joyful it was). And then in the final minutes, Ricci reached new levels when
while taking out the poison she had used to kill others in Season 1, she
accidentally injected and killed Natalie. Ricci’s devastation and despair was
something we had not thought her capable of and it was a new level. I can’t
wait to see what happens when Season 3 debuts or to see Ricci finally take an
Emmy. Maybe not this year, but soon.
Rhea Seehorn, Better Call
Saul
Okay let’s not kid
ourselves. We all want Seehorn to win here. Kim Wexler is by far the breakout
character of Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill’s soulmate through and
through. We watched the two sides of her nature war throughout the series and
in the first half of Season 6, we saw her naughty streak win out – and in the
final season, we saw the consequences. Kim was forced to drive for her life to
save Jimmy into a den of gangsters. Then she had to cover up the death of the
man she had helped ruin, attend his memorial – and finally realize she had gone
too far. The scene where Kim ended every
aspect of her life with Jimmy was the most heartbreaking scene in the entire
series – but it wasn’t the last time we saw her. In the final two episodes we
saw Kim living the dullest life possible, facing her role in the death of
Howard and the coverup, begin to put her life back together and in the final scene,
come full circle with the man she loved. Watching that, we saw something I
never thought possible from Breaking Bad a happy ending.
Seehorn has, in a sense,
been a victim of HBO prestige dramas for her entire career. Game of Thrones and
Westworld kept her off the boards the first four seasons of Saul, Big
Little Lies effectively the fifth. She was finally nominated last year but
ended up losing to Julia Garner. She’s rising fast in the odds, and I hope…I
want Seehorn to win this year.
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
Hope Davis, Your
Honor/Perry Mason
Davis has been one of my
favorite actresses since I first saw her play Joyce Draper in American
Splendor. Throughout the era of Peak TV she has always been a presence,
from brilliant roles in In Treatment and American Crime and a
superb performance as one of the leads in For The People. It is a real
possibility she will receive a nomination for Guest Actress on Succession, but
that does not strike me as sufficient to someone who on two different series
this year, played to perfection roles of pure evil. As Gina Baxter on the
second season of Your Honor, she continued to play the vicious,
manipulative power behind the Baxter throne, trying to control her family, purely
destructive, and in the final minutes of the season finale, seizing power and remove
the obstacles in her way. She was just as brilliant as Camilla Nygaard on the
second season of Perry Mason and was in fact far subtler. She initially seemed
to be a pillar of the community, someone that Della Street thought she could
model herself after. As the series progressed, her involvement with the crime
at the center of the series became deeper, until in the finale we learned that she
was, in many ways, the biggest monster the show had every produced. I know Davis will get recognition someday,
but I hope that one of these roles earns her a spot at the Emmys.
As to Guest Actor and Actress,
it is likely that many Succession figures will be here. I have little
problem with Davis or James Cromwell being her or indeed Cherry Jones. While I
have yet to see The Last of Us, I can hardly object to some of the
actors. Anna Torv has been due a nomination since the first season of Fringe,
I can not argue enough for Melanie Lynskey and I see that Nick Offerman is
currently the favorite in Best Guest Actor. He’s been owed at Emmy for years; I
hope he finally wins.
There will also likely be
several representatives from Better Call Saul repeating their iconic roles
from Breaking Bad. I would hope to see Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul
there, and I think everybody wants to see Betsy Brandt finally get some
recognition from the Emmys for her work.
Writing and Directing is
another story. I’ll wait until the Emmys to argue.
Next week, I will get down
to serious business when I take on the Comedies.
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