It sure seems like Television Academy voters only watched 3 shows this year
- "Succession," "The White Lotus," and "The Last Of Us" dominated many 2023 Emmys acting categories.
- While those series are critical darlings with very talented casts, other TV shows also exist.
It's not uncommon for a few top-reviewed TV shows and movies to dominate the annual awards conversation. But this year's Emmy Award nominations seem a bit more ridiculous than usual, as prestige dramas with ensemble casts are basically swallowing up acting categories whole.
Case in point: The supporting actor in a drama nominees comprise eight actors from just two shows. F. Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli, Theo James, and Will Sharpe were all nominated for their roles in "The White Lotus," while Nicolas Braun, Matthew Macfadyen, Alan Ruck, and Alexander Skarsgård were the picks from the critically adored final season of "Succession."
The supporting actress in a drama category is slightly less egregious (four shows are represented, but five of the eight nominees are from "The White Lotus"), while the guest actor and actress in a drama categories are solely folks who showed up in "The Last Of Us" or "Succession."
So, what gives? Did the over 20,000 voting members of the Television Academy seriously only watch a handful of TV shows this year? Maybe. The three shows that dominated the above acting categories also dominated the Emmys this year overall: "Succession" led the pack with 27 nominations, followed by "The Last Of Us" with 24 and "The White Lotus" with 23. (Yes, HBO is really unstoppable despite everything.)
According to Deadline's Pete Hammond, the Academy did attempt to avoid this by switching up the rules this year so that the voting Academy members were only able to vote for as many submissions as there were nomination slots in a given category — up to five nominees for most, and as many as eight in drama and comedy categories. (Since 2017, members were allowed to vote for however many submissions they felt were worthy in every award category, which seems pretty nuts.) Theoretically, Hammond writes, this was designed to help "spread the wealth," and it worked a bit for the writing categories. But in the acting categories, it backfired. Pretty spectacularly.
Gold Derby's Daniel Montgomery explains in more detail how it was probably meant to fix things here.
There were over 9,500 entries submitted across 124 award categories, according to the Television Academy. And yet somehow, the voting members opted to use their now-limited votes to recognize the entire cast of "The White Lotus," and not, say, Paddy Considine, who gave a powerhouse performance in season one of "Game of Thrones" prequel "House of the Dragon," or literally anybody in the spectacular supporting cast of "Better Call Saul" in its final season.
While it's hard to argue that the nominees who made it in aren't worthy (these shows are critically acclaimed for a reason), it makes for a bit of a boring awards conversation. As total viewership continues to decline (the 2022 awards show dipped to the lowest level ever recorded), the Academy may want to rethink its strategy and shake things up in a bigger way to make the Emmys a bit less predictable. How about capping the number of acting nominees to the highest-voted two — or heck, even three — submissions from each show? At the very least, it probably can't make things worse.