Why wasn’t your favourite show nominated for an Emmy?
There are TV shows we all love that have never won -- nor been nominated for -- an Emmy Award. And what is this outrage? Who do these people think they are? Don't they know "Parks and Recreation" deserves a parade of awards, and that "Arrested Development" deserved more than just a nod for Best Actor in a Comedy?
Well, believe it or not, there's a method to the Emmy madness. It's true: the process is more complicated than one might think. So, where do we begin?
First, Emmy nominees aren't chosen by a small number of people -- according to The Hollywood Reporter, the TV Academy is actually a "massive and mixed" group consisting of about 15,000 people (divided into 28 peer groups of specialized fields) who may only have loose connections to the TV industry. That's why it makes it hard to predict who will win at all: with so many people in the TV Academy, and with so many ties to different aspects of the industry, there aren't any guilds built to support guild members as there are with film. So think of the Emmys as a gathering of lone wolves, sort to speak.
Then, eligible nominees are posted on the Academy website, and despite the fact that Academy members probably can't review every single nominee (in 2011, there were 4,000), they vote anyway. That's why the likes of "Big Bang Theory" and "Modern Family" go up time and time again -- because they're familiar. But that said, occasionally a newcomer or underdog will be rallied around, which explains the popularity of "Homeland" last year, which was a bright shiny addition to the Showtime lineup.
And then comes the voting. This year, the 2013 voting occurred in August, when representatives from the 28 groups decide the voting process for each of the individual group's award categories. (Have I lost you yet?) But the peer groups aren't rounded up based on a bunch of friends working together: no, writers vote on writing, performers vote on performances, and so on. However, all eligible members can make nominations in program categories. After spending many hours watching the shows, the nominees are completed, votes are cast, and tallies are drawn, and winners are named. The process sounds complicated and arduous because is is.
It actually used to be even more involved. Blue ribbon panels once decided nominees "after watching sample episodes submitted by the 10 shows and stars that received the most popular votes in each category." Now, though, those nominees are determined more by popular vote. The downside is this: the blue ribbon panel helped recognize low-rated cable shows and their stars, and when big networks saw their big shows bumped by the little-series-that-could, the Academy was challenged. So that's when they decided to keep the blue ribbon panels, but only let those judges' votes count by half. Which helps to explain why you see the same shows and stars nominated over and over again.
So, why hasn't your favourite show been nominated? There's almost no real clear answer: with so many people voting so many different ways for so many different reasons, you can understand why some shows remain popular, and why the likes of Steve Carrell never won an Emmy win for playing Michael Scott on "The Office." (Just kidding -- we will never, ever understand why that happened.)
Who do you hope to see walk away with an Emmy? The 65th Annual Emmy Awards air Sunday, Sept 22 at 8 p.m. ET on CTV.
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