For a voting body as massive as the Television Academy—around 20,000 people in total—the Emmy winners were, until quite recently, decided by a very small group of people. Panels of volunteers from a given branch (acting, directing, writing, and so on) would gather to watch the submitted episode(s) of each nominee in a category, a process that had its benefits and its drawbacks. The contending work was more carefully considered, yielding deserving, surprising winners—a then unknown Aaron Paul for Breaking Bad, a then Emmyless Margo Martindale for Justified. But a kind of monotony settled in too, year after year. Broad submissions like Jim Parsons’s outrageous Big Bang Theory tapes proved almost unbeatable, while legendary performances like The Office’s Steve Carell and Mad Men’s Jon Hamm could never win. In fact, Hamm only won for Mad Men’s final season—which was also the first year the Television Academy changed its system into a popular vote.
That popular vote is still with us, and explains why the Emmys have evolved into a new brand of profoundly frustrating ceremony. After yet another year of popular shows sweeping the categories—Ted Lasso, The Crown, and The Queen’s Gambit averaged nearly 10 Emmys apiece this year—it’s time voters consider going back to the old way of doing things.
A pause to explain what happened on Sunday night. In 2015, the Television Academy opened up its winner-voter pool to include the entirety of a given branch, meaning what was once often determined by dozens of people is now reliably determined by thousands. Sample episodes are still submitted, but hardly monitored for screening (or, likely, watched beyond the popular stuff). The shape of the awards is completely different.
This is why The Crown, evidently the most popular drama among the Television Academy, got checked off in every single drama-series category on Sunday night. Most infamously, Tobias Menzies beat the late Michael K. Williams in supporting actor; it’s hard to imagine Menzies pulling that off under the old system that relied so heavily on single episodes, since unlike most of his costars he didn’t even get a featured episode this season. Meanwhile Williams did some career-best work in his most notable installment of Lovecraft Country.
This isn’t to say The Crown, a very good show, isn’t worthy of a lot of awards. But sweeping has become endemic to the Emmys since the mid-2010s. Last year, Schitt’s Creek pulled off the same feat in comedy. Phoebe Waller-Bridge hit the stage over and over for Fleabag the year before, at one point calling the repeats “ridiculous.” In 2021, between drama, comedy, and limited series, a total of seven shows won 21 Emmys. Take out Michaela Coel’s highly deserving I May Destroy You writing triumph and Ewan McGregor’s highly puzzling Halston upset, and that fraction becomes five for 19.
The Emmys previously employed a judging-panel system because there was too much TV for the entire Academy to dedicatedly watch to properly do its job. Problems arose in who took part in the ritual: Panels consisted of an older, often likely whiter sample of the already pretty old and white Television Academy, who had the time to watch sometimes dozens of hours of TV and debate the nominees. (Remember Jeff Daniels’s upset win for The Newsroom?) As membership was diversifying—and the mandate to honor a more inclusive range of work became clearer—opening the floor made some sense.
Ironically though, in the six years since the panel system went away, the amount of TV content has completely exploded. And by contrast, troublingly and inevitably, the amount of television being honored by the Emmys has dramatically contracted. In 2014, the last year the judging panels were in effect, 11 programs split the top awards. And in 2013, that number was 15 programs. To be clear: That is more than double the amount of series that won on Sunday night. And that’s what we should be seeing now—a huge, historically diverse landscape of television being honored accordingly.
Ted Lasso, Hacks, Mare of Easttown, The Queen’s Gambit, and The Crown are well-regarded shows, but they’re hardly all that TV has to offer—and limiting TV’s biggest night to them makes for a very dry show. (No wonder Coel’s rousing victory felt like such a mood-shifter.) That all these shows are also all overwhelmingly white, leaving work such as Lovecraft Country and The Underground Railroad empty-handed, further betrays the spirit at the core of the popular-vote shift—and moves in the opposite direction of where any Hollywood awards show should be going right now.
There’s a way to more productively reinstate voting panels for Emmy winners—and hell, for nominees while we’re at it; it’s hard not to see it as excessive when The Handmaid’s Tale and Ted Lasso each have four stars nominated in a single acting category. (Until 2009, smaller panels also decided the Emmy nominees.) Look at how BAFTA has changed its approach: Juries that are required to include people of color were organized to decide many of last year’s film nominees, resulting in a groundbreaking—and exciting—group of artists. (Granted: Voting was opened up to the whole of BAFTA for the winners, which were largely white.)
Though the Emmys largely honored quality work on Sunday night, they utterly failed—once again—at capturing what makes the medium so exciting. They ought to look to the past to figure out how to fix that.
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