At the 76th Emmy Awards, the biggest surprise was perhaps the most telling. At the end of a night in which The Bear, arguably not a comedy, swept most of the comedy categories, it lost the crucial trophy for Best Comedy Series itself.
The winner ended up being Hacks, another long-time Emmys favorite that is occasionally accused of not being a real comedy. Hacks also beat The Bear for Best Actress in a Comedy Series and Best Writing in a Comedy Series.
This quasi-upset encapsulates the current state of the Emmys. After a year the industry spent largely recovering from the historic dual strikes from both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild in 2023, Sunday's awards were marked mostly by familiarity. Every era of the Emmys has its favorites, and this year kept largely to the Television Academy's current beloveds.
The Emmys' new darling was Baby Reindeer, which won four awards and took home the trophy for Best Limited Series. Perhaps the most daring new favorite was Shōgun, which dominated the Drama category with three wins, including Best Drama Series, and at the very least asked viewers to read subtitles.
Yet these Emmys were lackluster in more ways than just the predictability of the winners. To begin with, it was actually the second Emmy awards of this year. The 75th Emmys, which recognized television from June 2022 through May 2023, aired belatedly in January after it, too, was delayed due to the strikes.
Sunday's Emmys recognized a particularly sparse season of television. The strikes halted work on some of the industry's biggest shows for months, pushing their premieres out of the window for recognition this season. (Eligible shows had to complete a certain number of episodes between June 2023 and May of this year.)
The calendar produced some peculiarities: Although critics soured on The Bear in its third season, which premiered in late June, it was richly rewarded Sunday night for its second season, which aired all the way back in summer 2023.
The ceremony itself managed to keep things lively, even if the awards themselves were relatively dull. Father-and-son hosting duo Eugene and Dan Levy broke out their old Schitt's Creek comic timing to oversee the ceremony with affably low-schtick aplomb. (A runner about Eugene being constantly befuddled, lost in the audience, his texts riddled with errors, was way more charming than it had to be.)
An extended bit about the cast of SNL assuring Lorne Michaels that he wasn't a failure despite 85 losses landed nicely. Lamorne Morris received a surprise win for his supporting performance on Fargo, an upset that surely had more than one household of New Girl fans shrieking "Winston!" in delight.
The Emmys even went political in this election year. Mega showrunner Greg Berlanti, who was behind network TV's first gay kiss on Dawson's Creek, accepted the Governors Award with a memory of what TV meant to him as a gay kid growing up in the 1980s. John Leguizamo, introducing Television Academy chair Cris Abrego, made a fiery speech calling out the plentiful brownface in Hollywood's past and celebrating the diversity among this year's nominees (34 actors of color were nominated in the performance categories).
Liza Colón-Zayas, who won Best Supporting Actress for her role on The Bear, called "for all the Latinos who love to love me" to "vote for your rights." Candice Bergen, presenting the award for leading actress in a comedy, compared Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance to her former nemesis Dan Quayle, VP under George H.W. Bush. ("Meow," she deadpanned.)
On the other hand, in classic Emmys fashion, the liberal speeches were followed up with a celebration of TV cops, introduced with the theme to Cops, one of the most infamous pieces of copaganda on television.
The predictability of the awards could also feel heavy — especially when so many current Emmys darlings are not just overly familiar but also right up on the edge of abusing the category rules, or sometimes simply not very good.
The Morning Show remains a glossy, high-budget piece of camp nonsense, but it earned 23 nominations. The Bear had an excellent second season, yet it's hard not to dwell on how its comedy accolades — for a season that was largely about cycles of family abuse — were shutting out true sitcoms, like Abbot Elementary. ("I know some of you might be expecting us to make a joke about whether The Bear is really a comedy," said Eugene Levy in the opening monologue, "but in the true spirit of The Bear, we will not be making any jokes.")
It's possible that TV could be on an upswing after this year's low point. The strikes have been resolved, and there's a crop of promising shows that are premiering this fall, including FX's The English Teacher and Hulu's How to Die Alone. TV can and should be good again.
The bad news is that there are still deep structural issues stacking the deck against producing shows of the caliber that defined the golden age of TV, like Mad Men, 30 Rock, or Girls.
Despite the gains earned from the strikes, writers, actors, and production workers have all struggled to find jobs as the streaming boom has cooled, leaving Hollywood in a prolonged economic downturn. The most recent generation of writing talent is still undertrained after a decade of mini rooms that left them cut off from TV's old apprenticeship model and without what used to be fundamental skills (like where act breaks are supposed to go, for instance).
When shows are well-crafted, they too often fall into the category of what New York Times critic James Poniewozik calls Mid TV: expensively made and well cast shows that nonetheless display a "willingness to retreat, to settle, to trade the ambitious for the dependable." All those slick remakes of beloved old properties, all those paint-by-numbers genre warhorses with beloved movie stars in the lead.
If the fates allow, we shouldn't have to suffer through a year of television as disappointing as this one was again. It will take a lot more than ending the strikes, though, to get us into a new golden age of TV.
