However, this year came with a new brand of tea leaves, brought on by a significant change: whereas past years have seen winners determined by a limited blue-ribbon panel of voters in a given peer group, this year the voting was opened up to all members of said groups, meaning the voting pool increased exponentially. Reporting speculated that this could dramatically alter the winners, skewing toward populist series and diminishing the impact of the episode submissions that were typically considered crucial variables in the blue-ribbon panels’ decisions.

Accordingly, this year’s predictions narrative had more weight than usual, pushing those who were following the story to see each early win as a marker of a given narrative. And it didn’t take long for such a narrative to emerge, even if I joked about it being premature when I called it early on: HBO swept through the broadcast like the behemoth it once was, laying waste to numerous records in the process. Game of Thrones shattered the record for most wins by a series in a single year well before it won for Outstanding Drama Series, and Veep won three awards—including the fourth consecutive win for Julia Louis-Dreyfus and second for Tony Hale—before it emerged to dethrone Modern Family and take HBO’s second-ever win for Outstanding Comedy Series. Combine with Olive Kitteridge’s near-sweep of the Limited Series category—losing only Supporting Actress—and you have the most dominant performance for a single channel or network in recent Emmys history. It’s the first time that a single channel has taken home the TV Movie (Bessie), Limited Series (or Miniseries), Drama, and Comedy awards in the same year since the TV Movie category was added in 1980.

There are a large number of conclusions we could make based on this. We could discuss how the opening up of the voting pool privileged a show like Game of Thrones that has both large viewership and strength in the creative arts categories whose voters were previously unlikely to vote in the program awards. We might ask if the accessibility of HBO programming—both through elaborate screener DVD boxes sent to voters and through the ease of HBO Go/HBO Now—makes it more likely that voters have seen shows on the channel, versus some of the competition. We can ponder how the potential dilution of submitted episodes’ importance to the process privileged past winners and nominees with whom voters were familiar (thus giving Veep an advantage over newcomer Transparent, which won Lead Actor and Directing Emmys for Amazon Studios).

And yet here’s the thing about awards: we’ll never know. Although the social media consensus on my feed seems to be that Game of Thrones would have been more deserving in earlier seasons, or that Transparent was breaking more ground in comedy than Veep’s political satire, there’s every possibility Emmy voters felt Game of Thrones had its strongest year yet and Transparent was a drama masquerading as a comedy and dragged down by Maura’s unlikeable children. It becomes easy to forget in efforts to “solve” the Emmy voting process by turning it into an objective process that it is an inherently subjective one. And while I am an advocate for contextualizing the specific subjectivities that shape each year’s winners lest we accept the prestige they’ve come to represent as an asterisk-free marker of television greatness, this year’s awards reminded me and everyone else who follows the Emmys too closely that there will never be evidence to support any of our conclusions. We will never know exactly why a given series or performer or writer or director won an Emmy award. It is beyond our reach.

And yet lest the above read as an outright rejection of Emmys narratives, this was nonetheless a night that reinforced how the swirling subjectivity of industry awards can transform such that objective consensus emerges. Fitting given the night’s controversial spoiler-laden montage of series finales—which would’ve been harmless with fewer climactic moments chosen in editing—this was a night where two actors had their last chance to win an Emmy for a role that will define their career. And whereas Parks and Recreation’s Amy Poehler had her chance swept away by the HBO tide, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm emerged victorious, winning his first Emmy—and the first acting Emmy for any actor on the AMC series, inconceivably—and earning a standing ovation in the process.

Technically, that win inspires just as many questions. Had the tape system and limited voting pools held an often-reprehensible character back in previous years? Did all those HBO-happy voters feel about The Newsroom the way I felt about The Newsroom? And yet those questions don’t matter as much when the victory feels just, as was also the case when Viola Davis—the clear standout of the uneven How To Get Away With Murder—took to the stage after winning Lead Actress in a Drama Series and spoke eloquently and righteously about the struggle facing actresses of color when you don’t see people like you standing on that stage winning Emmys. It doesn’t matter if this new voting system was responsible for Davis’ win, because it was both a deserving performance—although there’s that subjectivity again—and because it represents a small step toward addressing the Academy’s longstanding struggle with diversity.

You could argue that “it doesn’t matter” describes the whole evening, and not just the various procedures that preceded it: it is very possible to overstate the importance of the Emmy Awards, as HBO publicity will helpfully—if deservedly—demonstrate over the next 24-72 hours. But Davis’ win stands out as an example of an Emmys moment that unquestionably matters, and pushes a deeper consideration into not simply who wins Emmys, but how they win them, and how that remains an area where greater work in diversity and representation can and should be explored by the Television Academy. And perhaps here we can make a distinction, then: it may be impossible to safely predict the Emmys, but it’s very possible to investigate that process with a critical eye, one that hopefully with move beyond procedures to the politics that underlie them in the years that follow.

The lack of crowd response led Harrelson to dub it “too much of an inside joke,” but it was far from the only joke that seemed designed for those who spend their waking hours scouring industry trade press (or, to put a finer point on it, for me). I got the joke, and a good portion of my self-selected Twitter feed got the joke, and I even got the subtextual joke of McConaughey and Harrelson presenting the award many expected they’d be competing for until True Detective switched categories. However, one imagines the presumed mass audience of television viewers tuning into this year’s ceremony had no idea what Harrelson was referring to, just as they were confused by Seth Meyers’ jokes about Orange is the New Black’s category switching, or by Julianna Margulies’ pointed “22 episodes a year” reference in her acceptance speech, or by the words “Tatiana Maslany” in the Billy on the Street pre-taped segment.

The internal politics of the Emmy Awards are a rich discursive space, one that plays out each year in the nominating process, the nominations, and then the broadcast itself. Months of trade publication ad campaigns, Gold Derby Google Hangouts, and talk show appearances all converge in a single evening, and for those who follow that narrative it becomes a game of seeing whose submission tape won over the voters and how a show’s win in one category could signal a win in a different category later in the show. As one of those people, the Emmys broadcast is a dynamic experience, a vessel within which existing television industry narratives—the rise of Netflix, the miniseries/limited series debate, the “dramedy” problem—are highlighted, complicated, and narrativized. Although who wins may not actually “matter,” it is nonetheless part of the process by which the television industry understands itself, and thus a piece in the puzzle of how we understand the television industry.

However, the Emmys rarely present themselves in this way: instead, they are a celebration of television, heralding the greatness of the medium in this golden era. But this year’s ceremony made no effort to narrativize the year in television beyond a brief opening countdown and a Weird Al Yankovic theme song parody medley, even eschewing the typical tributes to each genre as the ceremony moves from section to section. The show’s lack of flow—including the In Memoriam beginning with no introduction—left no room for any attempt to make it all mean something more than a collection of subjective evaluations of television quality mixed in with jokes for people who read Deadline, a choice that made the awards feel remarkably niche despite the fact that broadcast series performed surprisingly well, in opposition to Meyers’ monologue joke about cable and Netflix’s dominance.

The lack of an effort to hail a more mainstream audience was particularly confusing when Television Academy president Bruce Rosenblum emerged for his speech about the state of the medium of television, the one moment in the show dedicated to the kind of self-narrativizing we’re used to seeing in other elements of the broadcast. However, Rosenblum delivered his speech as Sofia Vergara stood on a rotating platform as eye candy to distract us from this typical, “boring” award show ritual. The objectification of the bit was concerning, particularly given Rosenblum’s specific comments regarding the increased diversity of the Academy mashed up with Vergara’s “This is what it’s like in America” banter, but it was also puzzling given that the rest of the broadcast seemed designed for an audience tuned into the industrial logics surrounding multi-platform viewing.

The narrative of any given award show has always been discursive, determined by the winners and how those winners are spun by the press: you could sense the headlines changing as the night went on, with Modern Family and Breaking Bad’s continued success drowning out the possible “Rise of Netflix” or “Movie Stars on TV” narratives that were carried into the ceremony. The latter offered the broadcast’s most concentrated reference point, although one that was more reinforced by Jimmy Kimmel’s brief hosting takeover, Comedy Directing winner Gail Mancuso’s eye contact with McConaughey during her acceptance speech, and Julia Roberts’ inflection during her presenting gig than by any element of the production itself. In the absence of a production-sponsored narrative, narratives sprung from other elements of the evening, diving further into inside baseball territory as the night wore on.

It also, at least in my experience, amplified the role of social media in shaping these narratives. As following award shows on Twitter becomes a more accepted—if not necessarily mainstream—practice, it becomes a subsequent space through which award show broadcasts are translated. What would have historically been post-show overviews by trade press or major newspapers becomes color commentary and factual details that work in real time to transform the chaos of subjectivity into disappointment, excitement, surprise, or any other narrative imaginable. And when the broadcast itself is making minimal effort to contribute to that narrative itself or pull it away from the specifics of winners and losers, social media emerges to fill the gap for those choosing to view the show in a connected setting.

There is an argument to be made for an understated Emmys broadcast, especially given it came in at exactly three hours, but it creates a vacuum of meaning that needs to be explored further. While this results in some broad pro/con narratives in the context of the popular press, it also reminds us of the Academy’s disinterest in highlighting issues of race or gender in the context of their broadcast, and pushes us to continue exploring the identity politics—or lack thereof—of award shows that in their absence of narrative invites us to construct our own based on their disparate component parts and the filters through which we engage with them.

Agnosticism is, however. This year’s Emmy nominations demonstrate that notions of television quality are category agnostic, in that the same performers or series are likely to garner nominations even if they show up in a fundamentally different category than they appeared in previously, or if they emerge in a category that actively takes advantage of the vagaries of the Emmy nominations system. Whereas the rules governing Emmy Award categories—as I’ve discussed previously—can fundamentally shape who is nominated in meaningful ways, this year also reveals the inherent slipperiness of those categories in the midst of an increasingly competitive environment.

This slipperiness is not new—Downton Abbey has competed for both Miniseries and Drama Series, and the rise of the half-hour “dramedy” has inherently called into question the broad distinction between comedy and drama operating in the Emmy nominations process. But this year there is a much larger collection of series straddling these lines. True Detective, a close-ended miniseries that will return for a second stand-alone season, is nominated for Outstanding Drama Series, while Fargo—also a close-ended miniseries that could return for a second stand-alone season—is competing in Outstanding Miniseries (with American Horror Story, which brought this emergent television form into the Emmy conversation two years ago). Orange is the New Black competed as a Drama at the Screen Actors Guild and the Golden Globes earlier this year, but is nominated as a Comedy at the Emmys (which is also competed as for the Writers’ Guild Awards). Shameless, which competed as a drama for three seasons, moved to Comedy and garnered William H. Macy his first nomination in a less crowded lead actor category. The Outstanding Miniseries category includes only one program we could unequivocally consider a miniseries, with the other five nominees each slotting into one category vagary—a short final season (Treme), canceled after a single season (The White Queen), a short British season (Luther)—or another.

This has typically been framed as “category fraud,” but such a term presumes there are explicit rules being broken, or that networks or channels making these choices are doing something “wrong.” While any categorization has to pass Academy scrutiny—Shameless had to apply for the change, for example—there is no real basis on which the Academy could refuse these distinctions. There is no rule against Netflix using the various other awards earlier in the year to test out how Orange Is The New Black competes as both a Drama and a Comedy before making a final decision. There is no rule against HBO taking True Detective out of the Miniseries category to maximize the channel’s chances of winning its first Drama Series Emmy since The Sopranos and leave the Movie/Miniseries field more open for Ryan Murphy’s The Normal Heart. While there are undoubtedly limits to a network or channel’s ability to redefine programming with a distinct generic or formal identity, this year reveals that those limits have yet to be reached.

In truth, the Emmys have always been slightly category agnostic. History has shown voters will find certain actors or certain shows anywhere regardless of the category, nominated because of who they are more than because their performance was particularly well-liked—such “name-only” nominations may be primarily speculation (we cannot know for certain what Emmy voters did or did not watch), but Kristen Wiig’s nomination for her role in IFC’s absurdist miniseries Spoils of Babylon stands out as a case of voters finding Wiig—nominated five years in a row for her work on Saturday Night Live—in a different category rather than finding Spoils of Babylon (which only garnered a nomination for Theme Music otherwise).

But whereas those decisions only threaten to reveal that Emmy voters might not consider the quality of performance in relation to the category as the primary factor in their decision-making, a long-ago accepted reality of industry awards more broadly, these more recent developments have thrown into question the Academy’s entire structuring of the Emmy nominating process. It is a process that forces categorization without enforcing particular definitions of those categories, meaning that it fundamentally encourages discursive reworking of genre or formal identities while also forcing that discursive work to latch onto specific categories—Comedy or Drama, Series or Miniseries—that may or may not logically describe the programming in question.

The consequences of this are minimal: I may believe Orange is the New Black is a drama, but that “fraud” does not alter my relationship to the series in any meaningful way. Although I will continue to argue for the Emmys as a meaningful discursive space for engaging in questions of identity and in understandings of larger trends in how television value is determined, the slipperiness of the Emmy categories is—like coverage of prominent snubs—more a point of consternation than a point of meaningful contention.

Nonetheless, however, the sheer volume of categorical question marks this year is notable. Although the nominations suggest voters are category agnostic, the very existence of categorical distinctions suggests the Academy itself is not. And while it’s hard to imagine an Emmys without distinctions between comedy and drama, or between series and miniseries, the slippery nature of those terms raises the question of whether or not the Emmys will adapt either in conjunction with or in opposition to the discursive reframing of those categories by its members’ voting patterns or the networks and channels actively taking advantage of a malleable system.

The Emmys began late due to a mess of a football game, where the New York Jets managed to sneak out a victory after setting team records for penalties and penalty yards. It was an omen for the night to come, where any objective referee would have penalized Ken Ehrlich and his production team on countless occasions. From the moment the ceremony began with an aimless sequence where the Emmy production team proved their ability to edit footage from various television shows together into fake conversations between television characters, it was clear that this was an evening set to celebrate television in the most misguided of ways.

It was unfortunate for the show’s producers there was no clear narrative that emerged out of the night’s winners: the Netflix ascension never materialized, Breaking Bad expanded its trophy case with wins for the show and Anna Gunn but didn’t dominate as it could have, and Modern Family went unrepresented in acting categories for the first time but nonetheless won the one that matters, Outstanding Comedy Series. It means the telecast itself becomes the narrative, and a rather unpleasant one at that.

There were the special eulogies for individuals who had passed on, which drew controversy for selective criteria in advance of the ceremony and criticism from viewers and winners—Modern Family’s Steven Levitan—for giving the evening a somber tone. There was the choice to maintain the audio feed in the theater for the In Memoriam segment itself, enabling the always tacky “Applause Meter” to judge the level of celebrity on display. There was the nonsensical appearance of Elton John to perform a new song that “reminds him” of Liberace only to attempt to justify his appearance given his nonexistent relationship to television. There was the excruciating opening segment that transitioned from the aforementioned pre-taped sequence to a lazy Saturday Night Live monologue where a parade of previous Emmy hosts were wasted right up until the point Tina Fey and Amy Poehler momentarily wrestled the show from its imminent doom.

And yet it was the look back in television history to the year 1963 that best encapsulates the broadcast’s problems. Combining a superfluous performance of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” from Carrie Underwood with a Don Cheadle-delivered retelling of a tumultuous year in our history, it sought to position television at the forefront of culture. It was television that helped the nation heal about JFK’s death, gave Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” resonance, made The Beatles the phenomenon they would become, and—in an awful segue—continues to serve as the launching pad for musical acts like Underwood. Anyone with an understanding of history—yet alone media scholars—would have scrawled all over their script, which fails to cite sources to support any of these overly simplistic claims.

In addition to this problem, however, it was also a sequence that implicitly argued the Emmys exist not simply to acknowledge the best in television, but also to reaffirm to us that television is an important part of society, and that—according to Television Academy chairman Bruce Rosenblum during his annual spiel—the Academy is there 365 days a year to help make this “golden age of television” a reality. This rhetoric was also evident in the sequence where Diahann Carroll read a prepared statement about her impact as the first African American actress nominated for an Emmy, turning over the microphone to Scandal’s Kerry Washington; it was the Emmys touting their progressivism, a noble gesture that does not change the dramatic underrepresentation of men and women of color both at the Emmys and on TV in general, and does not magically transform the Television Academy into the Peabody Awards overnight.

The Emmys are at their worst when they feel as though they are about the Emmys. As someone who has over time accumulated a wealth of knowledge about the Emmy Awards as an institution, I reveled in Ellen Burstyn joking about the screen time for her previous nomination and often found Ken Ehrlich’s broadcast fascinating in its tone deafness, but its ultimate failure is both undeniable and unfortunate when I consider the worthy—if, yes, also wealthy—winners whose personal and professional triumphs were overshadowed by the spectacle or lack thereof around them.

The most frustrating detail was in the special choreography segment featured in the broadcast’s final hour. For most viewers, the routine inspired by nominated series was representative of the hokey, misguided production numbers elsewhere in the broadcast. However, for me it was a rare case of one of the Creative Arts categories—consigned to a previous ceremony, which this year aired as a tape-delayed, edited two hours on FXX—being elevated to the main stage, with the choreographers—many of whom I respect based on their work on reality stalwart So You Think You Can Dance—nominated for their work in television being given an expansive platform for their work and an acknowledgment of their labor.

Whereas FXX’s broadcast only acknowledged nominees for guest acting awards, and aired only small portions of winners’ already short speeches, for a brief moment the Academy recognized the work of choreographers at the Emmys itself; it was unfortunate that what surrounded it so diminished the meaning of the performance. It was a broadcast that prioritized promotable musical acts at the expense of time for television professionals to accept their awards, so busy performing the “importance of television” that it forgot what—or who—actually makes television, if that was something the Academy even knew in the first place.

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.

The disparity is a source of a great deal of online outrage given the reputation of Louie—which some expected had a chance to break through—and Parks and Recreation—which was nominated last year—among both critics and the people who follow them. However, it reveals a consistent tension between the part and the whole when it comes to evaluating television in this capacity. While the writers who decide the nominations in this category are pushed to focus on individual segments, those nominating series or performers are supposed to be focusing on entire seasons; of course, this requires them to have seen entire seasons. It’s no secret that most Emmy voters don’t watch as much television as critics or other engaged viewers, which often leads to presumptions that they don’t actually bother watching anything at all.

However, let’s give the Emmy voters a bit more credit: instead of watching nothing, what if they watch the episodes provided for them? At this stage in the race, networks send screeners to Emmy voters, but they usually only send a representative sample, selecting a handful of episodes—while networks have sent out entire seasons before (which helped DirecTV break into the Emmy race with Friday Night Lights), generally speaking even the more diligent Emmy voters who sit down to watch the material sent to them will only see a sliver of the seasons under consideration.

On this note, allow me to float a theory regarding the big story of this year’s awards, which is PBS’ Downton Abbey dominating the Drama Series categories. I discussed the series’ problematic definition as a Miniseries during last year’s awards (a discussion we could have again regarding FX’s category fraud with American Horror Story), and PBS managed a stunning collection of nominations moving into the main race, including six acting nominations (most among Drama Series), Writing, Directing, and a nomination in Outstanding Drama Series (knocking off the only commercial broadcast series in contention, CBS’ The Good Wife). While many predicted the series to break into the race after its success last year and its increased profile in season two, supporting nominations for Mr. Bates, Mr. Carson, and Anna were never part of the conversation.

For me, there are two factors to consider here. First, while the series is now in its proper category, there’s a certain degree of genius in PBS’ accidental Emmy gamesmanship: by launching first in the safety of Miniseries, Downton took advantage of the prestigious but sparse nature of the Movie/Miniseries categories, gaining considerable profile in “high-class” categories before trying to break into the series race. While shows like Mad Men had to share the Drama Series narrative with shows like Friday Night Lights and Boardwalk Empire last year, Downton swept Outstanding Miniseries/Movie and the attached writing and directing categories despite strong competition from the HBO machine and Mildred Pierce.

However, more importantly, PBS treated Downton like a Miniseries even while submitting it in the Drama Series category. They only submitted a single episode for consideration in Writing/Directing—the season-ending Christmas special that brought the season’s storylines to a romantic and tragic conclusion respectively— where other series submit 8-10. However, they simultaneously sent the entire season to Emmy voters, meaning that those who desired to consume the whole series could do so (more quickly than with longer runs for shows like Mad Men or Homeland). Its ability to be both easily reduced and easily consumed makes for a strong combination, and it seems to have worked: the presence of Michelle Dockery—prominent in the Christmas Special—over Oscar nominee Elizabeth McGovern (who was nominated last year), and the dual nominations for Brendan Coyle—whose Mr. Bates was wrongfully convicted of Murder in the episode—and Joanne Froggatt—playing his wife—would both suggest that the Christmas Special was at the forefront of voters’ minds when they cast their ballots, meaning that voters either started at the end or made it there eventually.

I raise this point not to cast aspersions on Downton Abbey’s nominations—although my punny title may betray my thoughts on the series’ second season—so much as to understand the context in which they appear in such number. While some could suggest its presence in these categories as a win for populist, non-commercial television, that its reputation was born in the highbrow Movie/Miniseries category frames its presence here very differently. Additionally, it is a presence that could very well be framed by a single episode, either as a standalone installment or an emphatic end note to a short-run season viewed in its entirety.

At this point in the race, the Emmy Awards become all about selection: actors and actresses submit a single episode of exemplary work (which is aired in its entirety for Lead Acting nominees and edited into only scenes featuring the nominee in Supporting), while series submit three sets of two episodes with each Emmy voter receiving one of the three at random. While this does mean that no show is ever judged based on an entire season, and no actor is ever considered based on a larger body of work, it does mean that Downton’s focus on a single episode or an entire season is no longer so easy to control—whether they have three sets of two episodes that can equally wow voters now becomes the question of the hour.

[For more analysis of the awards, see News for TV Majors’ Roundup post.]

However, behind every award show is an extensive process wherein nominations are determined and winners are chosen—in other words, we can distinguish between the “televised award show” as a media event and “entertainment awards” as a semi-transparent process. This process eventually becomes a media event when the nominations and winners are announced, but otherwise it remains a niche point of interest.

This is not to say it is invisible. The process behind the Academy Awards has been particularly visible in recent years, with Harvey Weinstein helping usher in a new era of competitive campaigining and numerous websites popping up to cover the “race for Oscar” by engaging in meta-discourse with “For Your Consideration” campaigns launched in the trades. Such sites make visible the efforts of studio executives, agents, and other industry players to campaign on behalf of particular films, or particular performers, taking discourse that might remain within industry channels and sharing it with communities of readers who follow the race as amateur prognosticators or curious bystanders.

However, while sites like Sasha Stone’s Awards Daily or Tom O’Neill’s Gold Derby—which expands beyond film to cover awards in Theater, Television, and Music—have built a niche covering entertainment awards long before they enter into mainstream culture, the ongoing campaign surrounding the 2012 Emmy Awards has expanded into popular sites such as Deadline and Entertainment Weekly sooner than ever before. Mirroring an existing trend at Gold Derby, both EW—through their “Emmy Watch” feature—and Deadline—through AwardsLine coverage—have turned over their digital pages to interviews with key Emmy contenders, offering a platform to extend their campaigns for a nomination and an eventual victory.

It is common for entertainment sites to predict potential nominees, or for critics to offer their own personal choices if they had an Emmy ballot; doing so engages with readers who have their own opinions, tapping into cultural and critical hierarchies that stir debate and, subsequently, page views. However, the recent trends at Gold Derby, EW and Deadline expand beyond this meta-discourse into becoming part of the discourse of FYC campaigning. This isn’t EW‘s Ken Tucker or Deadline‘s Nellie Andreeva offering their perspective on the Emmy Awards: this is two publications choosing to allow the pages of their websites to become nearly identical in function to the “FYC” ads appearing in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter.

In other words, to take EW‘s “Emmy Watch” feature as an example, the audience here isn’t the casual reader of Entertainment Weekly looking for the latest entertainment news, but rather the Emmy voters who could potentially nominate an actress like Revenge‘s Madeline Stowe—who of course hasn’t even considered what episode she’d submit, lest she appear cocky—for an Emmy award. While the expanding audience for online coverage of television news and reviews means these interviews are not exclusively valuable to voters, as I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to read Aaron Paul discussing a standout moment in Breaking Bad‘s fourth season, the context EW places them in seem tailored to the elites who make the decisions rather than the audience who watches the awards from home.

Each “Emmy Watch” post opens with the following spiel:

“Between now and June 28, the deadline for Emmy voters to return nomination ballots, EW.com is running a series called Emmy Watch, featuring highlight clips and interviews with actors, producers, and writers whom EW TV critic Ken Tucker has on his wish list for the nominations announcement on July 19.”

While EW ties the feature to a critics’ wish list, the inclusion of the voting deadline seems like unnecessary information for casual readers, designed instead to ensure voters who land on the post are given this key reminder. Indeed, stopping the series before June 28^th doesn’t make sense unless the goal is to directly influence the voting process: while speculation has value up until the July 19^th announcement, active campaigning has an earlier expiration date.

Rather than informing their readers, these pieces serve the interests of agents/publicists—who, from personal conversations I’ve had with journalists, actively seek outlets to promote their clients’ Emmy aspirations—and networks searching for visibility within crowded ballots.[1] Why is EW willing to become an outlet for what amount to puff-pieces designed to promote specific contenders? It’s likely the same reason Deadline is producing six AwardsLine print editions in the buildup to the Emmy Awards—in addition to their online coverage—that award voters can have sent directly to their door for free: by producing content related to the race for Emmy nominations and eventually an Emmy victory, and by explicitly aiming that content toward Emmy voters, publications have a better chance of drawing the “FYC” advertising dollars being spent by the networks.

Gold Derby has been following this model for a number of years, but the trend’s expansion into major publications like EW and Deadline raises new questions about entertainment journalism’s relationship with the “For Your Consideration” process. While this may present a new frontier for advertising revenues, allowing these publications to continue momentum from the Academy Award “FYC” process earlier in the year, the willingness of these publications to generate content strategies consciously designed to better facilitate those revenues casts aspersions on their independence from the industry they cover.