In State of the Streamers, Vanity Fair’s Awards Insider goes inside the campaigns of some of this Emmy season’s biggest players—from front-runners to underdogs, on streaming networks both well established and brand new to the game. This entry focuses on Amazon, which had some major breakthroughs in this year’s nominations, along with one major snub.
Not too long ago, Amazon Prime Video led the streaming wars—at least as far as awards tallies were concerned. Transparent won the first-ever lead-acting Emmy for a streamer, for Jeffrey Tambor. It became the first streamer to win the comedy-series Emmy with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. A few years later, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s lauded Fleabag dethroned HBO’s repeat-category champ Veep, with its creator taking home three trophies for herself.
You may notice, though, that all of these breakthroughs happened on the comedy side of the equation. Along those lines, you could look at this year’s Emmy nominations as a major win for Amazon: The network finally broke through—to little surprise, in best limited series with Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad, and to great surprise, in best drama series with the superhero saga The Boys. Amazon Prime Video was thrilled to “set some records internally,” a source familiar with the campaigns for the streamer says, after many years of just missing the cut.
The news was less positive beyond those two milestones, however. Relatively nascent competitors Apple TV+ and Disney+ lapped Prime Video in the nominations total—Amazon’s total count for 2021, 18, was notably less than last year’s. Perhaps most distressingly, not a single actor from an Amazon Prime Video series was recognized, despite Small Axe’s John Boyega and The Underground Railroad’s Thuso Mbedu being considered competitive for wins in their respective categories, before they were snubbed altogether.
Small Axe, overall, came into this season among the most acclaimed productions eligible, and with several awards from—confusingly—film-critics groups under its belt. The collection of movies from Oscar winner Steve McQueen wound up with just a single nomination for cinematography, a huge blow to what was campaigned as a major contender. “It was heartbreaking—I’ll be honest about that,” the source says, before chalking the near-blanking up to “category confusion, but also…blinders on, in terms of voters, in terms of what box they want to put things in.”
The dramatic underperformance of Small Axe points to ongoing issues with categorization, as the definition of television continues to expand. This year, the Emmys changed the name of its best-limited-series category to also include anthology series, which was the best description for Small Axe. “Small Axe is in the same category, but they’re two entirely different things,” the source says in comparison to The Underground Railroad. “One tells a complete story from start to finish over 10 episodes; another is a series of five films that’s united thematically, but has…a different cast, different stories, and [an] incredible range of format.”
For comparison’s sake, after the Television Academy received intense backlash to a rule merging variety-sketch and variety-talk series, it reversed course. But fewer than 10 sketch series were even submitted for consideration, rendering the final number of nominees in that top category to a lowly two—a misleading representation of the quality the form produced this season.
As to the nomination totals, our source says Prime Video is in the “quality game, not the quantity game.” (The decision to put all of its resources behind another unconventional contender in The Boys, at least, paid off.) But even among its shows that did well nom-wise, wins will likely be in short supply. If there’s any justice, Jenkins will get a run in directing for his singular work on Underground, but as Emmy math has it, overall category frontrunners The Queen’s Gambit (Scott Frank) and Mare of Easttown (Craig Zobel) seem to be more favored. And while The Boys can hope to build on this year’s successes to a broader embrace next season, it’ll very much play a bridesmaid role in the drama categories.
All of which is to say—Amazon has reason to celebrate this season, but there’s work ahead.
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