Who Will Succeed Succession as Emmys Darling?

This article originally appeared in Gold Rush, a subscriber-only newsletter about the perpetual Hollywood awards race. Sign up here.

Welcome back to Gold Rush, and welcome to Emmy season (such as it is)! We’re going to be covering every step of the TV awards race from here through September’s Emmy Awards, helping to make sense of and have fun with an awards apparatus that has always stood in the tall, slender shadow of Oscar, but which has a lot more moving parts. You’ll never get bored covering the Emmys, if only because there are one thousand categories, each with something like twelve nominees. The Emmys ballot will rival your tax forms for impenetrable length, though it will hopefully exclude the shows from this year that were more painful than being audited (sorry, Secret Invasion and Frasier).

One thing that doesn’t take an advanced degree in Hollywood to glean is that Emmy voters tend to pick their darlings (shows, performers) and ride them to the end. As a result, nothing is as predictive to future Emmy success as past Emmy success. Which means that when a TV show that has dominated the Emmy ballot for years ends, the subsequent ceremony presents a significant blank space, and a scramble to fill it.

On the comedy side of things, the end of Ted Lasso frees up real estate in the performer categories. Last year’s nominations for Jason Sudeikis, Phil Dunster, Bret Goldstein, Hannah Waddingham, and Juno Temple in lead and supporting roles will be up for grabs. Though the question of which comedy series will take Ted Lasso’s place has already been answered: The Bear. The Drama categories are another story entirely, where last year Succession not only won six of the seven televised dramatic awards but was nominated for 14 acting awards among the lead, supporting, and guest categories. Interestingly, among the eight series that vied for Outstanding Drama last year, seven (including Succession) aren’t eligible this year, either because they ended (Better Call Saul) or didn’t air a new season, due to the strike or otherwise (Andor, House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, The White Lotus, and Yellowjackets). That leaves only one possible repeat nominee from last year, and… we’ll get to it.

Not to tout the brand name here, but we could quite literally see a gold rush to break into those open spots. Here’s who’s most likely to compete:

The No-Brainer: The Crown

There’s a way to end this conversation and go home early, and that’s to suggest that the sixth and final season of The Crown will get its victory lap, after a year that saw a huge ramp-up in royals drama. In 2021, when Succession took a little extra time between seasons 2 and 3, The Crown was the show that stepped in, winning Outstanding Drama (a first for the show and for Netflix) and five of the six acting categories. Is there any reason to think that won’t happen again? Well, enthusiasm and critical acclaim were both noticeably down for the final season — our own Jackson McHenry found it overly decorous and dramatically unsatisfying as it glided over Diana’s death. And only Elizabeth Debicki (as Diana) has won any kind of major award since the second Crown cast’s reign. That said, it would be a surprise if the likes of Debicki, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West, Lesley Manville, and Jonathan Pryce didn’t at least nab nominations.

The Hot New Things: The Curse and Mr. and Mrs. Smith

To be clear, the Emmys are not the Golden Globes. They don’t just gravitate to the last shiny object dangled in front of them and vote for that. But with so much open space in Drama, some new blood is bound to flow in. Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s The Curse may have confounded some audience members and left others disappointed by its ending, but this was a show that wore its ambition on its sleeve, and Emma Stone is basically a lock for a Best Actress nomination. Over at Prime Video, Mr. and Mrs. Smith was flashy and sexy, and the Emmys were big fans of Donald Glover’s Atlanta, so I’d feel comfortable betting on this new show, too.

The Camp: The Morning Show and The Gilded Age

Sometimes all it takes is for a labor dispute and the end of an awards magnet to open the doors to an era of unprecedented success. Apple’s The Morning Show has always been the beneficiary of a curious degree of awards love, given how any assessment of the show tends to lead with how bonkers it is. Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carell have all been bestowed Emmy nominations for their portrayals of UBA morning TV luminaries. Billy Crudup even won in Supporting Actor a few years ago… and honestly he kinda deserved it. In a TV landscape this crowded, star-studded lunacy at least helps a show stand out, especially when the showrunners can make the case that said lunacy is intentional. And yet the show itself has never been nominated for Outstanding Drama Series. Many are predicting that to change this year, apparently on the logic that if we can send Bradley Jackson to outer space, we can squeeze television’s most bonkers “prestige” show into an eight-program lineup.

Significantly less feted in its first season was HBO’s The Gilded Age, which was unable to to translate creator Julian Fellows’ Downton Abbey awards success into an American context. But this year, its combination of sumptuous costumes and sets plus the finest actors Broadway could spare may well place it above a lot of its competition. As with The Morning Show, it turns out it’s a lot more fun watching theater-trained actors make a meal out of themes of turn-of-the-century social change and the life-or-death stakes of party planning. Do you actually remember the details of international intrigue in The Diplomat, or can you better recall what Carrie Coon was wearing when she stared Donna Murphy straight in the eye and didn’t blink?

The Genre Fare: Fallout

There was a time when Emmy were notorious for turning up their noses at critically acclaimed genre dramas like Battlestar Galactica and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But after a decade or more of Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian, WandaVision, and Andor making themselves at home among the Emmy nominees, that snobbery no longer applies. Which is good news for a show like Netflix’s Three Body Problem, which cloaks itself in particle physics but is mostly just an alien-invasion story. Or for Loki, which slumped significantly in its second (and seemingly final) season, but might be able to ride on the fumes of its crackerjack first installment.

The most likely genre series to benefit from this trend, however, seems to be Amazon Prime’s Fallout. One year after HBO scored a nomination with the high-end video game adaptation The Last of Us, Prime delivers its own video game adaptation, which feels closer to the steampunk/futuretech aesthetic mishmash of a Westworld (appropriate, since Jonathan Nolan is behind this show as well). The reviews have been great, and it’s premiering late enough in the season to get noticed but not so late that it’ll get lost in the crunch of May.

There’s also the matter of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the highly acclaimed series which, if nominated, would be only the fourth instance of a Star Trek series getting an Outstanding Drama nod ever, and the first since Star Trek: The Next Generation got nominated in 1994.

The Apple of It All: Slow Horses

Every Emmy season takes on some kind of factional concern, whether it’s Netflix and HBO battling back and forth for the overall nomination-count supremacy or Hulu setting records for itself as it did two seasons ago. This year, Apple TV+ appears to be trying to take over the Emmy narrative by sheer numerical domination. I’ve already mentioned The Morning Show. The frankly excellent spy series Slow Horses may finally get its due in its third season. It’s not every day that Colin Farrell headlines a TV series, which puts Sugar into play. Ditto Juliette Binoche, who’s opposite Ben Mendelsohn as Coco Chanel and Christian Dior, respectively, in The New Look. Godzilla is, frankly, so hot right now, which would make the well received Monarch spinoff series not the craziest option. Even shows like Criminal Record and Hijack, which have thus far struggled to differentiate themselves from the pack of thrillers on streaming, boast the likes of Peter Capaldi and Idris Elba, respectively.

But if you’re thinking that hardly any of these shows previously listed feel like traditional Emmy bait … exactly. The end of Succession plus the effects of the strikes have added up to an incredibly odd Emmy season, especially in drama. (Note for Shōgun fans: yours is a limited series and won’t be competing in the drama categories.) The results will be strange… but potentially very exciting. An uneasy mix of lavish period dramas, irony-pilled provocations, post-nuclear sci-fi, spycraft both sexy and sloppy, and shows that are so bad they come back around to being great — this is a far cry from the Cop Show / Lawyer Show / Doctor Show days of the 1990s. Even if it all ends up being a sweep for The Crown, it’s gonna be a weird ride getting there.

Joe Reid , 2024-04-20 16:00:28

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