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By H. Alan Scott
Senior Editor
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There are years when the Emmys feel genuinely up for grabs, and there are years when you could fill out the ballot in pen. This is a pen year.
The 78th Primetime Emmy Awards air Monday, Sept. 14 on NBC and Peacock, live from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, with Law & Order: SVU's Mariska Hargitay hosting. She is the first woman to host the show in 15 years, which is its own kind of headline. The winners, though, are mostly already written.
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Drama: The Pitt, again
Expect to hear a lot about HBO Max's The Pitt. Noah Wyle's emergency room drama led all shows this year with 25 nominations, and it took home Outstanding Drama Series last year. If Wyle and company aren't being announced, it will probably be Pluribus, Vince Gilligan's Apple TV sci-fi series, which pulled 18.
Erik Anderson of Awards Watch sees the same shape as last year, when The Pitt beat Severance. "We have this traditional old school medical procedural essentially versus this Apple cerebral show, which has a legion of fans that are very, very excitable," he told Newsweek. "I think we're kind of being set up with another one of those where The Pitt is just able to really dominate."
The one drama category with any real air in it is Lead Actress. Rhea Seehorn is the frontrunner for Pluribus, but Keri Russell could take it for The Diplomat, and Zendaya is lurking for Euphoria. The final season of Euphoria split viewers badly enough that it missed the top category entirely, yet Zendaya and Colman Domingo both got in. Voters who loved the performances and not the show have exactly one place to put that feeling.
"One thing that potentially is a benefit is Rhea Seehorn might finally be able to win, because The Pitt doesn't have a lead actress," Anderson said, referring to Seehorn long being overlooked at the Emmys.
He isn't ruling out Russell, though. "I think Keri Russell can absolutely win. I think she can be the spoiler," he said, then immediately objected to his own word choice, because "spoiler" implies a runaway frontrunner and there isn't one. The real draw is her husband. Matthew Rhys is nominated for Widow's Bay and The Beast in Me, and a double win would be the story of the night. "He won for The Americans. She never did. And she should have," Anderson said. "There is that really neat thing that could happen where her and Matthew Rhys both win on the same night." His bias, stated without apology: "Completely removed from performance and content, that is exactly what I want to happen."
Supporting Actor in a drama looks like a Pitt traffic jam, with Patrick Ball, Shawn Hatosy and Gerran Howell all in. Anderson thinks that's exactly why it goes somewhere else, and his pick is Tom Pelphrey for Task. The other threat is the man who will not die: "Billy Crudup is the cockroach of The Morning Show," Anderson said. "He is the only one that keeps surviving year after year when they [Emmy voters] clearly don't care about the show otherwise."
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Comedy: a farewell tour and a newcomer
Things are a smidge more spread out on the comedy side, but only a smidge. The big winners are going to be Hacks and Widow's Bay. The final season of Hacks set a record with 24 nominations, the most for a comedy in a single year. Widow's Bay, Apple TV's horror comedy starring Matthew Rhys as the mayor of an island with a supernatural problem, landed 19 and led all new shows.
"You have a show leaving on a very high note, and then you have another that just absolutely blew up and is like the zeitgeist show of the season," Anderson said. He credits the old-fashioned rollout: Apple ran Widow's Bay weekly, and after three episodes it just kept growing, "a very classic old school, here's how you can grow an audience."
Lead Actress is the fun one. Jean Smart has four Emmys for Deborah Vance on Hacks and is going out on top. Lisa Kudrow has one Emmy in her entire career, from 1998, for Friends, out of 15 nominations. Both women are being judged on final seasons of shows they defined. Sentiment cuts in two directions here and only one of them gets a statue.
Anderson is not conflicted. "I don't think this is a race at all. I think this is the easiest call of the night. It'll be Jean, Hacks. She'll make history. It is a done deal." He would rather it went the other way. "I want a Lisa Kudrow, Valerie Cherish win," he said, referring to Kudrow's performance on The Comeback, before talking himself back down. "They're so locked into Jean Smart. She's an eight time winner. I almost feel like it's a requirement or a perfunctory, like they have to."
Within the industry though, this writer keeps hearing something else from voters. In conversation after conversation this summer, the answer to "Jean or Lisa" has been a version of the same sentence: 'Jean is going to win, but God, I want it to be Lisa.' That is not a prediction. It is a lot of people saying the same thing out loud.
Supporting Actress is Kate O'Flynn from Widow's Bay versus Hannah Einbinder for Hacks, and Anderson thinks that result is the tell for the series race. Both submitted episodes he calls unimpeachable. If neither takes it, watch Michelle Pfeiffer for Margot's Got Money Troubles, Jessica Williams for Shrinking or Dale Dickey for Widow's Bay, who Anderson floated as this year's Jeff Hiller, who was a surprise win last year for Somebody Somewhere: "That would surprise people but make them also super happy and it would be a really fun speech."
In Supporting Actor, Harrison Ford would be a great story for Shrinking, but Anderson sees only three real possibilities: Paul W. Downs for Hacks, Stephen Root for Widow's Bay and Nick Offerman for Margot's Got Money Troubles. A Downs win means a sweep, and it lands early enough in the broadcast to tell you how the rest of the night goes.
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Variety: the actual suspense
Here is the category worth staying up for. In January, the Television Academy merged Outstanding Talk Series and Outstanding Scripted Variety Series into a single Outstanding Variety Series, a response to years of shrinking submissions. That puts The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live in one room.
Oliver has won 10 in a row. Colbert won last year, helped along by CBS canceling him. Kimmel spent the year as a target of the Trump administration. It is the rare category where the politics of the moment and the math of the ballot are both genuinely unsettled.
Anderson, who has watched this category get split and re-split for years and is openly sick of it, thinks the room votes with its feelings. "This is actually a category where I think that sympathy and politics and all of that will be a real thing," he said. "I feel like it's going to be more politically motivated than we've seen here in the past."
His pick is Colbert, for the bluntest possible reason: Kimmel is still on the air.
In Competition Reality, there is no stopping The Traitors, though Dancing with the Stars getting its first nomination in a decade is a nice piece of trivia for the room.
The other thing about this ballot
Map out the likely winners and a pattern shows up fast. It is a very white list.
"When you do have a year like this where you can start to map out who the likely winners are, it's a very, very white year, likely for winners really across the board," Anderson said. He ran it category by category without much effort. Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress in a drama: white winners. Supporting in comedy, unless Jessica Williams, Tyler James Williams or Colman Domingo pulls off something Anderson calls very unlikely. The exceptions he could find were in limited series, where Riz Ahmed and Oscar Isaac are nominated for Lead Actor.
This is not a claim about who deserves what. Every name above earned the nomination. But the photos that run on Sept. 15 are going to look like one thing, and that will be the conversation the next morning whether the Television Academy wants it or not.
What's actually unpredictable
The winners are a formality. The podium is not. Given the political climate, the speeches are where this year's Emmys will actually happen, and the red carpet will do what the red carpet does. Set a reminder. Watch the acceptances.
The 78th Primetime Emmy Awards air Monday, Sept. 14 on NBC and Peacock. Subscribe to the For the Culture newsletter and the Parting Shot Podcast for your full recap.
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