This past weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys were about establishing two things: key front-runners ahead of Sunday’s main prime-time event, and the most ridiculous, enduring habits of at least a good chunk of the Television Academy.
Let’s start with the first part: The Queen’s Gambit has clearly pulled ahead in the extremely competitive limited-series race, having dominated below-the-line categories, including in areas where a win was hardly assured, such as cinematography (over The Underground Railroad, among others) and casting. In fact, the Scott Frank–helmed Netflix production will go into Sunday with a staggering nine awards already to its name, while its chief competition, HBO’s Mare of Easttown and Disney+’s WandaVision, can only claim a combined four.
In the other main categories, the word was good enough for drama front-runner The Crown—The Mandalorian earned more trophies, but its wins included visual effects and stunt coordination, which The Crown isn’t really eligible for—and very good for comedy heavyweight Ted Lasso. The Apple TV+ breakout won the critical bellwether award of casting: Over the last six years, every sitcom that has won that Emmy has gone on to win the outstanding-comedy-series trophy, including then underdogs such as Fleabag. As if Ted Lasso needed any more momentum.
The Creative Arts Emmys are best known, perhaps, for hosting some of the big categories that don’t make it onto the prime-time show. This annual tradition has evolved into a kind of ritual of head-scratching and fist-shaking too, with 2021 being no exception. While we had a very worthy drama-guest-actor winner in Lovecraft Country’s Courtney B. Vance—he gave a speech dedicated to his late costar Michael K. Williams that you wish would’ve made the main stage—his guest-actress counterpart was Claire Foy for what amounted to a season four cameo in The Crown. Screen time isn’t everything, but Foy—already a lead-actress Emmy winner for the role—has virtually nothing to do beyond further establishing the period series’ growth between seasons and cast members. Yet likely due to two Handmaid’s Tale nominees canceling each other out, Sophie Okonedo repping the DOA Ratched, and surely no one casting a vote for Phylicia Rashad right now, the path was paved.
The guest-acting categories feel, in many ways, like a relic of another era of TV: that of juicy spots on procedurals like Law & Order and heavyweight actors lending episodic gravitas to prestige dramas (like Patricia Clarkson on Six Feet Under). Over time these categories became jammed with supporting actors billed as “guests” on popular dramas, even though they appeared in virtually every episode (i.e., John Lithgow for Dexter’s fourth season). That rule finally changed in 2015, and since then situations like Foy’s have started popping up more regularly, with known characters returning for single scenes and getting recognized for it at the expense of actual, worthy guest turns. (Also see 2021 drama-guest-acting nominee Don Cheadle, of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.) Over in comedy, meanwhile, both guest-acting slots were won by Saturday Night Live hosts for the second straight year.
These decisions represent where the Emmys often fall short, with voters still tending to name-check what they know over what’s worthy, and failing to accurately distinguish different classes of television. It’s why the TV-movie category—once among prime time’s biggest prizes—is among my favorites to watch, now that it’s been all but banished to the Creative Arts ceremony. Due to ever-ambiguous and finicky rules, a Dolly Parton holiday movie had to compete with a glossy HBO stage adaptation (Oslo), a Lifetime biopic (Mahalia), and two well-received Sundance premieres that, had they been acquired by an outlet other than Prime Video, would probably not have been classified as TV movies (Sylvie’s Love and Uncle Frank). And sure enough, Netflix’s Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square—in spirit, a true made-for-television movie, if nothing else—beat all those titles. TV may be increasingly hard to define, but at least we all have Dolly Parton to agree on.
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