Emmy Voters Face the Usual Dilemma: Too Many Nominations for Too Few Shows

When final voting for the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards begins next Thursday, the 20,000-plus voting members of the Television Academy will be put in the position of essentially deciding a bunch of family squabbles.

Two lead actors from “Only Murders in the Building,” Steve Martin and Martin Short, will be competing against each other in one category. Two actresses from “The Morning Show,” Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, will face off in another.

Two from “The Bear” in two different categories, three from that show in another. Two from “Shogun” here, two from “Abbott Elementary” there. Three from “The Morning Show” in the supporting actor in a drama series category, and four (out of seven) from that show in supporting actress.

Those last stats led to an email that hit my inbox a few hours after the Emmy nominations were announced on July 17. It came from a voting lobbyist I’d met years ago when his support for ranked-choice voting in political elections dovetailed with my interest in the way the Oscars uses that voting system for its nominations. The subject line of his email read “Emmys nominations and approval voting again at work! Morning Show has 7 of 14 supporting actor/actress nominations,” and the email itself started this way: “And so it continues!”

And so it did. For years, Emmy voters have had the habit of showering a handful of programs with lots of acting nominations, culminating in 2022 and 2023, when “Succession” set a new record for a series with 14 acting noms and then equaled that record the following year.

This year wasn’t quite as blatant, with the top two shows, “The Bear” and “The Morning Show,” landing 10 acting nominations each — but it still had some jaw-dropping consequences, such as the latter show receiving three of the seven nominations in Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series and four of the seven in Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.

It led to an email chain between the ranked-choice advocate, me and a former voting coordinator for the Oscars. I pointed out that the “Morning Show” stats were far from the only examples at this year’s Emmys: “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” grabbed five of the 10 nomination slots in the guest acting categories in drama, while “The Bear” took five of the 12 in guest comedy acting. Overall, 27 different programs received acting nominations, but the top four of those shows got more than 35% of all the nominations, and the top seven shows had more nominations than the next 20.

“Remarkable numbers!” replied the voting maven. “I assume some decision makers are taking notice.”

But to quote a melancholy Dane: “Ay, there’s the rub.” The decision makers at the Television Academy have taken notice — a couple of years ago, when the category-hogging seemed to be aided by Emmy rules that allowed voters to cast their ballots for an unlimited number of contenders. So the Emmys changed the rules: Beginning last year, if a category qualified for five nominees, an Academy member could only click on five names on his or her ballot; if it had seven nominees, you could pick seven.

On paper, that might have encouraged voters to spread the love a little more, and to be less inclined to dump all their votes on the same shows. In practice, though, it didn’t seem to change anything. “Succession” got 14 acting noms before the rule changed and it got 14 after the rule changed.  

This year’s nominations once again suggest that we may have reached the point where the TV landscape is just too overwhelming for Television Academy members to give contenders the consideration they deserve. Even in a year like this one, where the number of eligible contenders in the drama, comedy and limited series program, acting, directing and writing categories fell by almost 40%, voters obviously still struggled with the volume of material they were asked to consider, and that pushes them not to share the wealth but to embrace their favorites with a vengeance.

And it’s not as if the shows that grab multiple nominations in a category will split the vote and lose out in the final tally. In the last three years, the period when category stuffing has been rampant in the acting categories, 14 of the 36 acting awards on the Primetime Emmys show have been won by somebody who is competing against at least one castmate in his or her category.

Only 10 times did nominees from a show with multiple noms lose to a contender who was his or her show’s only representative in the category.  

So maybe that means voters don’t view this as a dilemma at all; after all, it’s easier if you can catch up with a third of the actors on your ballot by watching just a handful of shows.

But as we’ve written before, this concentration of high-profile nominations in a few shows isn’t a good look for the Television Academy. But how could you change it? Ranked-choice voting would probably help because it shifts votes to where they’re needed, but the Emmys haven’t shown much appetite for that kind of overhaul in their 100-plus categories.

And you know, those dang voters would probably find a way to take a new system and make it look as if nothing had changed.

A version of this story appears in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

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