What do the Emmy nominations tell us about television?

Hollywood could use a little anarchy

Seth Rogen (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

It must feel pretty good to be Seth Rogen today. His Apple TV series The Studio –in which he stars as a beleaguered studio chief attempting to walk the fine line between commercial and artistic respectability – has been nominated for an impressive 23 Emmy awards. This ties the second season of The Bear (2023) for the most nominations for a comedy. Rogen himself could potentially win plaudits for writing, acting and directing, and the show itself looks like the one to beat in the category of best comedy series.

The show’s opponents include The Bear…

It must feel pretty good to be Seth Rogen today. His Apple TV series The Studio –in which he stars as a beleaguered studio chief attempting to walk the fine line between commercial and artistic respectability – has been nominated for an impressive 23 Emmy awards. This ties the second season of The Bear (2023) for the most nominations for a comedy. Rogen himself could potentially win plaudits for writing, acting and directing, and the show itself looks like the one to beat in the category of best comedy series.

The show’s opponents include The Bear – which ceased to be funny at least two seasons ago – as well as Hacks and Only Murders in the Building, both of which have had their moment in the sun. But the well-liked Rogen – a Hollywood fixture who smartly disassociated himself from his long-term collaborator James Franco when the latter became toxic – looks as if he’ll be triumphant come September 14, when the awards are presented.

You can, of course, raise objections both to The Studio – which I found reasonably entertaining but patchy, a Hollywood satire that ended up celebrating the industry more than castigating it – and the apparent desperation of the Emmy voters to recognize it in apparently every single category they could. Of the six nominations for guest actor in a comedy series, the show managed to gobble up five, with such big names as Bryan Cranston, Ron Howard (playing splendidly against type and therefore perhaps the funniest part of the entire series) and Martin Scorsese all vying for the award. Hopefully life will imitate art and the Nate Bargatze-hosted ceremony will see the defeated nominees shout abuse from the audience as whoever wins takes to the stage.

Otherwise, the Emmys provide an illuminating snapshot of where the various streaming and network services are at the moment. HBO and its streaming service Max garnered a total of 142 nominations (largely for such shows as The Penguin, The White Lotus and The Last of Us), but running close behind are Netflix and Apple, who are boasting the likes of Adolescence (filling the Baby Reindeer slot for hard-hitting British limited series), Black Mirror and the cult favorite Severance.

The Emmys have always prized big names (hence the nominations of Cranston and Scorsese). So it’s no great surprise to find Cate Blanchett nominated for the otherwise ignored Disclaimer; nor is it a surprise to see the Jake Gyllenhall-led cast of of Apple’s Presumed Innocent all recognized. The same goes for the great Gary Oldman (now Sir Gary Oldman, if you please) receiving another best-actor nomination for his all-time-classic portrayal of the seedy spymaster Jackson Lamb in Apple’s Slow Horses, itself competing for best drama series against Andor, Severance and The White Lotus, among others.

There will be disappointments and surprises for viewers. Although the peerless Andor was nominated for 14 awards, I would have liked to have seen it receive more love for its actors (especially the brilliant Stellan Skarsgård and Genevieve O’Reilly), but there has been a strange unwillingness to acknowledge how epochal and game-changing the show has been. Few would have described the latest series of The White Lotus as its best – Emmy-nominated Sam Rockwell’s extraordinary, hallucinatory monologue aside – but such is the institution’s determination to keep recognizing popular shows that it has made a strong impression, along with the increasingly grizzled The Bear. Still, with Rogen and The Studio likely to be the big winners on the night, 2025’s Emmys will probably be remembered as a vintage year for backslapping and navel-gazing. Let’s hope that a little anarchy comes through on the night and loosens things up. 

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