Every year the Primetime Emmy nominations go a little more according to form, and Wednesday’s list was perhaps the most predictable yet, with only one very slight curveball in the main drama and comedy series categories (see “The Curse,” below). Here are some highlights from a very short list of notable snubs and surprises.
Snub: ‘John Mulaney Presents Everybody’s in L.A.’
The talk-series category went exactly as expected — the series nominations went to “The Daily Show,” “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” — which is what the category is known for. But it was particularly galling that this year, when John Mulaney’s inventive ode to Los Angeles, rendered in a classic late-night format live on Netflix, offered an attractive alternative, that the voters went with the same old Colbert-Kimmel-Meyers lineup. (The show did receive a nomination for picture editing.)
Snub: ‘The Curse’
Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s dark satire on marriage, home renovation and reality TV for Paramount+ and Showtime was thought to be in the running, if only marginally, for drama series. Its stars, Fielder and Emma Stone, were also borderline favorites for acting nominations. None of them broke though, however, which is getting to be a habit for Fielder: His previous attention-grabbing, opinion-dividing series, “Nathan for You,” received no nominations across its four seasons.
Surprise: ‘Scavengers Reign’
Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner’s beautifully drawn, eerily calm science-fiction tale was dropped by its original streaming home, Max, and picked up by Netflix a few weeks before nominations voting ended. Did the move give it the boost it needed to grab an unexpected bid in the animated program category? While it is gratifying to see a show this unusual get a nomination, the bigger news here is a snub: no nomination for the seventh season of the two-time winner “Rick and Morty.”
Surprise: Idris Elba
The lead acting categories were virtually surprise free, which makes sense when you consider that the comedy series and drama series categories were even more surprise free. The one really unexpected nomination was for Elba’s performance as a professional negotiator trying to get a hijacked airliner safely to the ground in the surprisingly popular Apple TV+ potboiler “Hijack.” Never bet against Stringer Bell. (Performers who were thought to have a better chance included Cosmo Jarvis for “Shogun” and Colin Farrell for “Sugar.”)
Snub: Kelsey Grammer
If there were a category for Lead Actor in a Comedy Rebooted After 20 Years, Grammer would have been a shoo-in for “Frasier” on Paramount+. He was still considered a strong possibility in the regular comedy actor category, but nostalgia did not carry the day; the superannuated psychiatrist was crowded out by an Indigenous Oklahoma teenager (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai in “Reservation Dogs”) and a three-century-old British vampire (Matt Berry in “What We Do in the Shadows”), as well as by the more predictable picks: Larry David (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”), Jeremy Allen White (“The Bear”) and Steve Martin and Martin Short (“Only Murders in the Building”).
Snub: A few people in ‘The Bear’ and ‘Shogun’
“The Bear” received the most comedy nominations ever in a single year and on the drama side, “Shogun” received the most of any series this year. As well as FX’s presumptive winners in their series categories did, however, they did not sweep the nominations to quite the extent they could have: Oliver Platt and Matty Matheson of “The Bear” did not receive bids for comedy supporting actor and Moeka Hoshi and Fumi Nikaido of “Shogun” were shut out for drama supporting actress.
Read More: Emmy Nomination Snubs: John Mulaney, ‘The Curse’ and More
