On Monday, members of the Television Academy started voting on this year’s nominations for the Emmy Awards. Yes, while some broadcasters and all streaming services boast they have abandoned the fall-season/mid-season model for TV, there are still markers that tell us time is up and it’s necessary to assess a period of television excellence.
This year’s Emmy Awards ceremony, to be held in September, will certainly be complicated by external factors, especially the #MeToo movement. How will voters regard Transparent and its former star Jeffrey Tambor, who won the Emmy for outstanding lead in a comedy series in 2015 and has been nominated multiple times? This year, it will be possible to vote for Tambor’s work on Arrested Development. How will voters treat Better Things, a show that the disgraced Louis C.K. had a hand in creating and co-wrote many episodes of? Would it be fair to its star, co-creator and other writer, Pamela Adlon, to punish the show for Louis C.K.’s actions?
Those are questions that will come to the surface when the nominations are announced on July 12 and the actual awards show looms. In the meantime, the beginning of Emmy voting is an opportunity to assess the past year in TV and offer a list of the best. They could be nominated but they are also there, somewhere online or on-demand for your viewing pleasure.
About 20 shows could make the list for Best Drama Series. A top five of industry favourites would be Season 2 of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, NBC’s This Is Us, Season 2 of The Crown (Netflix), Season 2 of Westworld (HBO) and the final season of FX’s The Americans. All are available to watch now, but in truth that looks like a paltry list. The Americans stands head and shoulders above the rest in its quietly intense, poignant and often thrilling end to its saga of Russian spies in the United States in the 1980s.
The fact is, a Best Drama Series contender is the most recent season of Homeland (seen here on Super Channel and available on Super Channel On Demand), which was superb. A tense, finely crafted espionage thriller that touched ominously on a political class in the United States tearing itself apart, it sizzled.
Counterpart, made for Starz and accessible here on CraveTV, is probably the best drama of 2018 so far. Emphatically a character-driven show, it’s also a thriller with a touch of sci-fi. Main character Howard (J.K. Simmons) works for a secretive United Nations outfit in Berlin and at the start he meets his doppelganger – the “Other Howard,” who lives in a parallel world. Simmons is sublime in the dual roles, while the layers of meaning, about the Cold War, the past and the present, represent a substantial depth.
A scene from Season 1 of Counterpart.Nicole Wilder
Outsider possibilities include Ozark (Netflix), Mindhunter (Netflix), Trust (FX) and The Deuce (HBO, available on-demand). Ozark was a popular hit late last summer. Although well-paced and entertaining, it had the feel of a series more about twists than substance. Mindhunter is simply brilliant. An unnerving drama about the origins of the understanding of serial killers, it stayed anchored in wit and humanity. Trust, about the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, heir to the Getty fortune, takes ages to find its feet again after a great opening. Donald Sutherland gets one of his best and meatiest roles as the recalcitrant old billionaire J. Paul Getty.
The Deuce aired last September and one hopes Emmy voters remember it. The work of David Simon (The Wire), it is about an intricately knit cast of characters on the seamy side of life in Manhattan in 1971. They are sex workers, pimps, con artists, bartenders, waiters and low-level mobsters. What happens to them and their milieu is a shift away from prostitution as business to low-level pornography as a way to make more money. “It’s a matter of looking at capitalism by looking at misogyny and porn,” one of its producers said, accurately.
However, The Deuce may be impacted by allegations that emerged as part of the #MeToo movement: Star James Franco has been accused of “sexually exploitative behaviour” by at least five women.
But wait, one of the series being touted in the U.S. trade papers for a possible Best Drama Series nomination, and even a win, hasn’t aired in Canada yet. That’s the BBC America series Killing Eve (starts on Bravo in Canada, July 22), which has been getting rave reviews in the United States from critics with good taste. It’s a feminist thriller with a glorious sense of humour and flair. Sandra Oh plays Eve, an MI5 agent playing a cat-and-mouse game with an assassin, Villanelle (Jodie Comer), who is skipping around the world killing people.
That’s just the contenders for Best Drama. We haven’t even got to Comedy Series and Best Limited Series. Good luck to the Emmy voters. The rest of us are trying to catch up.