However, BBC America’s campaign to earn Maslany an Emmy nomination comes at a time when the Academy’s traditional logics—while still present—are being challenged by new spaces for Emmy campaigning. Regardless of whether or not the campaign to earn her a nomination is successful, Maslany offers a valuable case study for understanding the value of an Emmy nomination and strategies available to harness and/or generate that value for those connected to the television industry.

Although BBC America may lack the prestige that AMC and FX have tapped into in recent years, they are one of a number of cable outlets that see the Emmys as an opportunity for legitimation. In 2010, USA made a flashy push for Emmy attention by flying banners over Los Angeles; while they were supporting specific candidates, they were also reinforcing that they deserved to be part of the conversation. Although USA has been shut-out since breaking through with two acting nominations that year, their example—outlined by their executives here—is one that a channel like BBC America can follow as it moves away from airing imported series and begins building an original content brand based around shows like Orphan Black, Copper, and Ripper Street. Maslany’s campaign came with its very own banner flying over Los Angeles pictured above, a splashy pronouncement not just for Maslany’s performance but also for BBC America’s desire to be perceived as an award-winning channel (outside of the marginalized miniseries category, where they have had success with imports The Hour and Luther).

Maslany’s campaign also comes at a time when the Emmys are beginning to function similarly to the Oscars in terms of an “awards season.” While the Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globes feature TV awards, they operate off-cycle from the Emmys, and happen too early in the year to function as clear precursors. However, the Broadcast Television Journalists Association has been bullish in promoting their Critics’ Choice Television Awards as a predictor of Emmy success, scheduling their awards for the day Emmy ballots became available to voters and touting throughout their streaming webcast how many of last year’s Emmy winners they had predicted, so as to spotlight their own legitimacy.

In truth, treating the CCTAs—or the long-standing Television Critics Association Awards, which have by default become part of the newly-formed “Emmy season”—as a precursor is ill-advised: the CCTA nominees are determined by small juries, and—like the TCAs—winners are voted on by a small, marginal membership with neither the Emmy crossover of the Screen Actors Guild members nor the decades of precedent held by the Golden Globes’ Hollywood Foreign Press Association. However, they function as a promotional precursor by offering channels like BBC America a platform; even Maslany’s nomination for a CCTA was a boost to BBC America’s campaign, but her eventual win for Best Actress in a Drama Series offers considerable momentum for her Emmy campaign. It also doesn’t hurt that a room of industry elites—read: Emmy voters—saw Maslany defeat Emmy champions Claire Danes and Julianna Margulies: chances are some of the looks of surprise in this video will increase the likelihood of curious actors or producers digging through their pile of channel-provided screeners to find out what the fuss is about.

That narrative of discovery is the ultimate goal of an Emmy campaign, but it doesn’t only have to happen within the safe space of award shows or guild-sponsored Q&As or the pages of glossy Emmy inserts from industry trade journals. While fans have often led informal social media campaigns in support of particular shows or performers, BBC America has been actively pushing Maslany through their official Twitter accounts by highlighting nominations and retweeting praise from fans and critics as the first season unfolded this Spring. By actively encouraging fans to get involved in the campaign on platforms like Twitter or Tumblr—on which BBC America has also been active—in this way, the channel seeks to blend their promotional campaign with the existing grassroots fan community around the series, known affectionately as “#CloneClub,” and as seen in this tweet from Maslany herself.

Although there is no clear evidence to suggest this kind of Twitter campaigning is reaching Emmy voters en masse, the #CloneClub has gained a few famous followers. Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof effusively praised Maslany’s performance on Twitter; Patton Oswalt excitedly live-tweeted his experience watching the series and tweeted about his thrill at meeting Maslany at the CCTAs; both Shawn Ryan and Kevin Williamson tweeted about watching the series, the latter isolating Maslany’s performance. Not all Emmy voters are likely tied into this community of industry professionals active on Twitter, but this convergence between industry and fandom nonetheless highlights the potential for buzz to translate to legitimate consideration.

Odds are that the obstacles facing Orphan Black and Maslany will prove more difficult for the Academy to embrace: even if BBC America is flying banners over Los Angeles, and even if Maslany adds a TCA award to her CCTA, much of Maslany’s buzz is isolated in critical communities likely only visible to a small niche of industry professionals whose influence within the mass popular vote-driven nominating process is limited. It’s difficult, though, to root against something that would challenge the traditional logics of the often stodgy Emmys, and it’s easy—if also somewhat optimistic—to imagine how the industry could embrace an underdog like Maslany when her example could open up doors for other performers, other channels, and other organizations that seek to acquire or determine television value.

Eleven different actors have played the title role in Doctor Who. The newest (and youngest), Matt Smith, is now enjoying his initial run as the Doctor, alongside a new co-star (Karen Gillan, as the mysterious Amy Pond), and a new showrunner in Steven Moffat, who has taken over the reins following Russell T Davies’ wildly successful revival of the series since 2005. If you’ve been waiting for a jumping-on point, this is it.

For the uninitiated, Doctor Who is a series actually peppered with such cleavages, which provide incoming production teams the opportunity to exercise some change while still maintaining the series’ core concept: the (mostly) all-ages adventures of a strange man and his friends who travel in time and space in a blue box that’s bigger on the inside. While I’ll grant what Matt Hills shrewdly points out in his recent Antenna post (i.e., that, due to the pressures of maintaining a popular commercial brand, this particular transition feels more like a continuation of the previous era than a clean break from it), there’s still new riches aplenty here. Moffat has repeatedly described his take on the series as “dark fairy tale,” vs. Davies’ more epic melodramas. Based on his previous scripts, and the first two of this new season, this is exactly what’s being delivered: creepy-yet-whimsical stories that shout “Boo!,” tweak your nose, and slip right past your cynicism.

That said, this stylistic blender has also forever marginalized the series in the US. Doctor Who has had a small, but devoted, audience on this side of the pond for over thirty years, which has steadily expanded since the series’ revival. However, it’s a love based mostly from a particular kind of US-based Anglophilia. In the 1970s and 1980s, the series took hold in this country not on early Saturday evenings, as it did in the UK, but on late Saturday nights, hidden away like buried treasure on PBS stations alongside similar “exotic” BBC imports like Fawlty Towers, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and Blake’s 7. Accordingly, we Americans tend to fall in love with Doctor Who for not being American television. American television can’t fathom whimsy. It can barely handle universal, all-ages entertainment any more. Moreover, while there’s no shortage of riveting dramas on American TV today, our expectations are too wired in boring old realism (even in our fantasy series) to allow the kind of “bonkers” tonal range Doctor Who thrives in, and too wed to notions of “sophistication” to let children in. There’s nothing on American TV that can thread silliness, horror, elation, and heartbreak at the level and speed of Doctor Who; we just don’t have a conceptual place for it in our televisual landscape. Joss Whedon’s works (especially Buffy and Firefly) arguably come close, and other series have certainly had moments (the Hurley episodes of Lost come to mind), but they’re all still firmly “adult” television. There’s no home for anything that dares to bridge these gaps of genre, style, and audience age. It’s fair to say that it’s anomalous in this regard on UK TV as well, though to a lesser extent.

Thankfully, the megachannel universe is big enough to let Doctor Who in, via BBC America, which is making the new run its signature series (though it has long slipped across the Atlantic unofficially via BitTorrent and other means).  So far so good for BBC America, which scored a record audience for the season premiere last Saturday. Still, taken as a proportion of the national viewing audience, the series draws about one-fortieth the viewers it claims in Britain, where it is one of the BBC’s most popular series, and one of the nation’s most familiar cultural texts.

Thus, while I will always love Doctor Who, I realize that I have ultimately experienced it as an exoticizing tourist. I regret that I’ll likely never see an American series with as much heart, panache, and unadulterated joy. I also wonder how the reverse situation–i.e., the arguably “Yankophilic” interest in American vs. British dramas among British TV scholars over the past decade–has developed, and whether we really do see the same things in these shows.