Emmy nominations showed some progress, but voters were still too reliant on old favorites

Vulture

The Emmy nominations announced Thursday showed that "the industry and its members are still broadening their scope in terms of the voices and types of shows they recognize, which counts as progress," says Jen Chaney. "But there’s also still a repetitive quality in the nominations that has been endemic to the Emmys basically since forever and hasn’t quite gone away." Modern Family was finally dropped from the outstanding comedy series category, but every outstanding drama series contender this year has been nominated in the category before. "While most if not all of them are deserving, that speaks to a long-standing trend of carbon-copy voting," she says. She also points out that the same seven reality competition series were also re-nominated from last year. The outstanding variety talk series remained nearly identical from last year, too, with the exception of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah replacing Real Time with Bill Maher. The rubber-stamping is especially flagrant in the outstanding animated series category, which has often featured South Park and The Simpsons since the 1990s -- while rejecting groundbreaking animated shows like BoJack Horseman (Rick and Morty earned its first nomination in that category on Thursday). "I said this last year, I’m saying it now, and I’ll probably say it again at roughly this same time in 2019: the television landscape is enormous and the Emmy nominations recognize only a fraction of it," says Chaney. "That’s inevitable to an extent. There’s simply too much to nominate everything that’s deserving. But while Emmy voters are recognizing more of the breadth of quality viewing that exists, they could still do even better. More than anything, they need to be more daring, something that is, admittedly, hard to do when a persistent chunk of your voting block leans toward old favorites."

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