Shortly after the Emmy nominations were announced on Thursday, outsiders to the jockeying among television producers scratched their heads.
They wondered why certain shows were included in categories that didn’t suit them.
Or why actors who were in nearly every episode of a series’ season run were nominated as guest stars alongside performers who only appeared in one episode.
They were also puzzled why an actor whose name is first in the credits would be listed as a supporting player.
Welcome to the labyrinthine world of Emmy nominating.
Peter Dinklage
In most cases, a studio submits a given actor in the category of their choice.
So while it may seem very strange that Dinklage is nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for “Game of Thrones,” it’s more likely that HBO thought he had a better chance of winning there than against heavyweights such as lead actors Bryan Cranston (“Breaking Bad”) and Kevin Spacey (“House of Cards”).
But let’s not forget: Dinklage is the star of the show. In the opening credits, his name appears first. And Tyrion is the most popular character on the series.
Let us address the “True Detective” controversy
This is a slippery slope, and many HBO execs have talked, not quite convincingly, how they felt their eight-episode show — which had a beginning, middle and end — was an “anthology show” and not a miniseries. Because then “True Detective” would be competing with “Fargo” — which had 10 episodes and also a beginning, middle and end.
According to Deadline Hollywood, HBO submitted the show as a drama series and the academy was fine with it.
“The project was pitched to us, it was produced by us and marketed by us as a series. Nic [Pizzolatto, the show’s creator] never thought of this as a miniseries, and we always treated him as a creator of a series. In our minds this is a series, and the only reason to enter it as a miniseries was a cynical reason that didn’t feel like the right thing to do,” said Michael Lombardo, HBO’s head of programming.
John Leverence, the TV academy’s senior vice president of awards, went along with this logic.
“‘True Detective’ really was a kind of slam-dunk no-brainer, because it had a ‘created by’ (credit), which we take as the WGA marker for a regular series,” he says. “Per our rules, if you want to jump out of what we think you should be in — like [moving from] drama series to go into miniseries, like ‘American Horror Story’ did a couple of years ago — you have to appeal to the awards committee and make some sort of a case. Well, ‘True Detective’ did not appeal, and so it was automatically just a drama series.”
We’ll see if voters agree with this awards ploy.
Diana Rigg
She is who she is, obviously. She’s also nominated for Best Guest Actress in a Drama Series for “Game of Thrones.”
Usually, a guest star appears in one or a handful of episodes, but Rigg, like fellow nominees Kate Burton (“Scandal”) and Allison Janney (“Masters of Sex”), was in several episodes.
Kate Mara was in exactly one episode of “House of Cards” before her character was pushed into the path of an oncoming train.
Guest-star billing is often contractual. Series regulars have less freedom to do other projects than those who have guest billing — and some actors prefer the distinction.
Comedy or drama
This is all about positioning. Most nominated comedies are half-hour shows.
When “Nurse Jackie” premiered, Showtime decided to submit it, and its cast, in the comedy category — good news for star Edie Falco, who won, even though she admitted she isn’t funny.
This year, the producers of “Orange Is the New Black” submitted that show in the comedy category, even though a lot of it isn’t comedic.
When dramas know they can’t compete with big boys, they go for comedy recognition.