The Highs, Lows, and Whoas of the 2024 Emmys
The 2024 Emmy Awards tried, in presentation and award distribution, to spread the love around. It paid tribute to classic, beloved shows and the archetypes that have been a constant throughout the medium’s existence: cops; moms and dads; coaches, I guess? It also rewarded current TV that took creative risks, including limited-series winner Baby Reindeer and the most dominant winner in the drama categories, Shōgun, which won a total of 18 Emmys for its detailed reimagining of the 1980 miniseries. There were some surprises, too, like the crowning of Hacks for Outstanding Comedy Series and acting wins for Fargo’s Lamorne Morris and The Bear’s Liza Colón-Zayas. But as is the case with all Emmys, there were definitely some low points, and yes, that is a reference to the bizarre spon-con for Johnnie Walker Blue that had no business being jammed into an awards ceremony.
LOW: A shocking, offensive, and frankly obscene hosting performance from Eugene and Dan Levy. Just kidding, it was perfectly fine. They are very charming. Some jokes worked, like the father and son needling each other about various roles they did not get. Some jokes didn’t land quite as well, especially in the opening monologue when they didn’t have the rhythm yet and the whole thing felt tentative. But the Levys understood the right approach to this gig — it’s a do-no-harm position — and they pulled it off with no major bumps. One note for the future, should they get the chance to do this kind of thing again: They should swap glasses frames at some point in the show to see if people notice.
HIGH: Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez present the first award of the night. As so many awards-show moments have demonstrated over the years, you can’t create chemistry between presenters. It’s either there or it isn’t, and the stars of Only Murders in the Building came Emmy-ready with an abundance of it. Martin and Short did their usual routine of busting on each other and industry silliness — Martin: “Whenever I see an actor I don’t know, I just say ‘I loved you in that scene with Nicole Kidman,’ and nine times out of ten, I’m right” — while Gomez shook her head and asked, “Do you see what I have to put up with every day?” We do, and we’d like more of it. Please host the Oscars as a trio. Thanks.
LOW: No Colin Farrell banter? Colin Farrell wants you to watch The Penguin, so he came to the Emmys to remind you, “Hey, Colin Farrell will be on our televisions (again!) soon!” But he won’t do banter and he won’t stick around after presenting the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, which is simultaneously disappointing and a choice I must begrudgingly respect when his performance in The Penguin is this good.
LOW: Matt Berry robbed! The Emmys finally got their acts together to nominate curmudgeonly delight Matt Berry, then they pulled the rug out from under him. It’s a crime! Do people not know quality comedic acting when it’s staring them in the face? Do people not care?! Congrats to Jeremy Allen White, we guess. (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai also robbed, to be clear.)
HIGH: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai’s face makeup. The Best Actor in a Comedy nominee for Reservation Dogs may not have gotten the opportunity to make an acceptance speech, but he did get a message across with a red-paint handprint on his face, a symbol of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement. The organization Native Hope describes the red handprint as a representation of “all the missing sisters whose voices are not heard” and “the silence of the media and law enforcement in the midst of this crisis.” Two of this year’s nominees, Res Dogs and True Detective: Night Country, both addressed this longstanding and widespread issue, and while both series have ended their runs, Woon-A-Tai kept the issue front and center.
HIGH (LITERALLY): Supporting Actress in a Drama Winner Elizabeth Debicki. She’s six-foot-three!
WHOA: Jean Smart wins for Hacks. A different comedy managed to break through The Bear’s Emmy dominance despite Irish hometown hero Ayo Edebiri’s hugely popular work on season two. While accepting her award, Smart thanked everyone at “HBO — Ma — no, HB — sorry,” before groaning in resignation and adding, “just what we needed, another network.”
HIGH: The Traitors breaks into Emmys recognition. Typically, the Emmys pick a show and stick to it, and lately, they’ve really stuck to RuPaul’s Drag Race, even if the show itself has fallen into a creative rut. But this year, they actually switched it up, embracing the kooky thrills of The Traitors and, correctly, the invaluable contributions of its host, Alan Cumming. Sashay away, Ru!
HIGH: John Oliver’s unfortunately perfectly timed dog shout-out. John Oliver, winning once again, ended his speech with what seemed to be a lighthearted shout-out to the family dog, except right as he brought up the point of the story — which, yes, as with a lot of dog stories, is about how the dog died — the Emmys orchestra began playing him off with a very melancholy music cue. Unfortunately, hilariously good comedic timing! We are very sorry to hear about the dog!
WHOA: Timing the Saturday Night Live tribute to happen right after it lost for Outstanding Variety Sketch Show. This is an even weirder timing issue than the John Oliver dog eulogy because this easily could have been avoided. Put the SNL tribute literally anywhere else in the show, before or after any other category. Lauren — I mean, Lorne — Michaels deserved more respect.
HIGH: Steven Zaillian explaining why everyone shoots in Italy. This man told us he hates blue skies, but in accepting the Emmy for Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for Ripley (a very correct award, especially for Zaillian’s mastery of black-and-white cinematography), he praised Italy, like, as a concept, and the series’ Italian cast and crew. It was all complimentary and pleasant: “I didn’t need anything after that,” he said of working in one of Hollywood’s favorite (read: quite incentive-friendly) shooting locations. Incorrect, Steven: We need another season.
LOW: Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna announcing only one award. Let the hottie BFFs host!
LOW: The Emmys pay tribute to stereotypical TV characters. As Richard Gadd put it in his acceptance speech for Baby Reindeer, TV should take risks. “There’s no set formula to this,” he said. And yet the Emmys ceremony decided to honor TV formulas as a concept tonight, toasting all the detailed, wacky, highly particular characters we love the most by throwing them all together in vague buckets and giving them one-word descriptors. You know, characters like “TV mom,” “TV dad,” and “TV villain.” Why not put Kathy Bates on a stage next to Anthony Starr? Why not remind people of the near-infinite selection of TV doctors but then make the, uh, unexpected choice of selecting Mindy Kaling as one of them? (Have any of you ever heard of Grey’s Anatomy?)
WHOA THAT TURNED INTO A LOW: That Johnnie Walker Blue Label Spon-Con. When the Emmys returned from a commercial break to find Ebon Moss-Bachrach at a swanky bar, it seemed at first like another salute to a TV archetype: people who work in food service. But no, it was [Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story voice]: a crummy commercial! For Johnnie Walker Blue Label! It seemed, for a brief moment, like the ad could overcome this gross act of awards-show negligence with a smooth execution, but that notion was quickly knocked unconscious by a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label. Then Taylor Zakhar Perez of Red, White & Royal Blue joined Moss-Bachrach, who assured him, somewhat awkwardly, that, “It’s okay to have a drink and present, uh, responsibly.” “Great,” Perez responded after some dead air during which, if you listened closely, you could hear Martin Short trying to swallow a snort. “That was so much fun,” Moss-Bachrach, obviously lying, said as the two entered the stage to present the award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. Dear Emmys: You can sell us TV, fine, but never, ever try to sell us other products during the celebration of your medium.
LOW: The TV Academy pats itself on the back for diversity. John Leguizamo’s lengthy celebration of diversity at the Emmys began with a joke about being a DEI hire. He then explained that DEI stands for “diligence, excellence, and imagination,” and that cringey comment set the tone for the rest of the presentation. Leguizamo pointed to nominees like Issa López, Sofía Vergara, and Kali Reis as evidence of how far the TV Academy has come on this issue, and added that this year was “among” the most diverse lists of Emmy nominees ever. Congratulations, TV Academy, you did it! Liza Colón-Zayas won! (She’s great!) But there was little acknowledgement of how few non-white performers actually win Emmys, and especially by the time Leguizamo brought out TV Academy president Cris Abrego, the length and effusiveness of the presentation started to feel like a distinct mismatch with reality.
LOW: Coaches? Yeah, yeah, Olympics athletes, fine. But why do this category without finding some way, any way, to include Kyle Chandler? Pay to fly him out! Get his face on a Zoom screen! Do whatever you have to do, just like Coach Taylor would! (Respect to the person who snuck Kenny Powers into the graphic for this segment, however.)
LOW: Andrew Scott not winning for his performance in Ripley. Richard Gadd gave a very moving performance in Baby Reindeer, but Andrew Scott was working on another level in Ripley, taking a character that many of us thought we already knew and building him into an entirely different, darker beast. After not even nominating Scott for his work on Fleabag, to not reward him for another, totally different, equally remarkable performance? Emmys, you really need to explain yourselves.
HIGHS: Toranaga-sama wins! Lady Mariko wins! Shōgun wins! Yeah, you better stop that play-off music when Hiroyuki Sanada starts speaking Japanese. If you didn’t go into the night knowing that Shōgun earned 25 Emmy noms for its first season — and took home 14 at last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys — the ceremony didn’t do a great job of leaning into that. The program barely cut to any of the show’s nominated cast members for reaction shots, despite Sanada being a movie star and Tadanobu Asano having one of the most charming smiles you’ve ever seen. There weren’t any gags involving the series (unlike The Bear, whose “not a comedy” allegations came up more than once). And when Slow Horses won a writing award over Shōgun’s two nominations, it felt like there might be some cause for concern. But then Sanada won for Best Actor (inspiring spontaneous weeping from his fellow cast members and nominees, including a quite teary Takehiro Hira), and Anna Sawai won for Best Actress, and finally — rightly — the series won for Best Drama. The whole mess of cast and crew members who got up there to accept the award reflected all the effort and work that went into this yearslong production, and it was a lovely touch when co-creator Justin Marks handed the mic off to Sanada to finish the speech in Japanese.
WHOA: Hacks wins best comedy! RIP “is The Bear really a comedy?” discourse, killed when a show everyone agrees is a real comedy wins in the best-comedy category. It shouldn’t be that surprising — Hacks is exactly the kind of series the Emmys traditionally recognize, with its appealing combo of beloved elder Hollywood stateswoman Jean Smart, jokes about millennials, and navel-gazing Hollywood industry story lines. But The Bear has been on such a roll over the past two years, and the season it was nominated for this time (its second, the one with “Fishes” and “Forks”) received near-universal critical acclaim and became an enormous success for FX. It seems The Bear flew too close to the sun, though. Season three got rockier reviews, and a fluke of timing meant Emmy voters were meant to be voting for season two even though season three was almost certainly foremost in their minds. Hacks, meanwhile, had the benefit of chugging along nearly discourse-free in its third season. Sometimes that’s what it takes to win: enough people who both know and like a show, and no big argument about where it belongs on the ballot.
LOW: Reservation Dogs ends its run without the Emmys it deserves. It’s not surprising, but it sure would’ve been nice if Emmys voters had gotten their acts together long enough to give Reservation Dogs a little love on its way out the door. It was never likely to happen, not with juggernauts Hacks and The Bear standing in its way. But Reservation Dogs was the better show overall, and more of its performances should’ve been celebrated. Do better, TV Academy!