Emmys ballot day is like Christmas for the nerdiest of us awards watchers, and indeed, the start of voting yesterday offered a fascinating window into the strategy of various networks and studios. Unlike the organizations that present the Oscars or most other awards shows, the Television Academy makes the Emmy ballots that voters use public—so we can see where every actor, writer, director, and craftsperson is submitted, and who gets left off entirely.
I’m David Canfield, and this year, the saddest omission for me personally was Sissy Spacek, a force on Dying for Sex as Michelle Williams’s estranged mother. FX declined to submit the Oscar winner, likely in order to clear a lane for the show’s more prominent supporting actress, Jenny Slate, to be win-competitive for her revelatory dramatic performance. Actors also have the opportunity to self-submit if they’re passed over by the studio, but it’s pretty rare since these ballots are the result of rounds and rounds of difficult conversations. A rare example of an actor successfully going rogue was Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie—in 2019, she submitted on her own, and got nominated.
The amount of names in a given category on the ballot determines how many nominees there will be, often an indicator of TV’s current era of contraction. Sure enough, for this first time in a long time, only five lead actors will be nominated in each of the fields—drama, comedy, and limited series/TV movie—due to a downturn in submissions. This feels especially painful in the drama races: With the five lead-actress front-runners seeming so set—Kathy Bates, Britt Lower, Bella Ramsey, Keri Russell, and Elisabeth Moss—will there be any room for newcomers like Keira Knightley or Kaitlin Olson to break in?
Finally, I love looking at the writing and directing ballots for a true sense of a studio’s confidence. Submit too many scripts, for instance, and a more vulnerable show may split the vote and not get any nominations. (This remains a tragedy in the case of Reservation Dogs for its final season last year. It could’ve won!) HBO famously submitted a script a season for Succession, and the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, went four for four in the writing category. This year, I was struck by the network submitting three episodes alone for The Pitt, its surging newbie in the drama races. That’s a sign of major confidence, and maybe an indicator that the network would like to box some of its competition out there.
Voters surely aren’t noticing most of these minuscule changes or maneuvers, of course, but if you’re one of them and you’re reading this, know the campaigning that’s been going on for months is now printed right in front of you, in plain sight. How that might impact the final results? See you on nominations morning in a month.
