Voting Is Over. Time to Get Real About This Year’s Emmys
It’s our job here at Awards Insider to lay out the exact mechanics of Emmy season—who’s up and down, how the biggest industry trends are coming into focus, which studios are pulling ahead and behind. And now voting for nominations has concluded, leaving us with the waiting game.
I’m David Canfield, and as we kick-start our biannual State of the Studios series—peering into how the slates and campaigns of major networks and streamers stack up against one another—we figured we’d start with the most, well, confusing contender of the bunch: Hulu.
On paper, the Disney-owned streamer has had a terrific year, with an array of strong comedies and limited series jockeying for major nominations. My conversations with strategists familiar with the campaigns say as much—there’s a lot to work with. But for average viewers, as I write in the piece, the definition of a Hulu show is broader and more muddled than ever. A chunk of Abbott Elementary viewers don’t know the breakout ABC sitcom any other way. Much of the FX stable debuted exclusively on Hulu, and if it didn’t (looking at you, Impeachment: American Crime Story), it found itself at a real disadvantage. As Disney continues to shape its streaming and TV assets, Disney+’s specialty sibling is looking pretty behemothic itself, and will inevitably define a large portion of the 2022 Emmys slate.
After the holiday, I’ll be rolling out analyses of what Hulu’s biggest competitors have cooking—or don’t—as we build up to our massive nominations-predictions post. (One tends to forget just how many major awards the Emmys make room for; forgive us if we omit a few lesser fields.) The feeling around town is pretty energetic, with voters and contenders back on the campaign trail, meeting and glad-handing in person. The season is bigger than ever, and back to some degree of normalcy—how those two factors combined in July 12’s results, and whether any spirited strategy really paid off, remains to be seen.
For now, it’s all quiet as we gear up for the holiday weekend and studios slowly start lining up their phase-two pieces, for a puzzle that’s never truly complete. Might I suggest catching up on some of the stellar June TV that may not be award-eligible yet, but is probably better off for waiting out all that noise? Or checking out one of the great summer films playing in theaters? And, hold on—fall-festival season is already starting up? Oy.
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