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.

However, this discussion truly begins in the months ahead of the Emmys. The numerous roundtable interviews and photo shoots organized by trade publications and wrestled over by publicists are where the politics of representation of awards season begin to form, while the Emmy submissions themselves offer a subsequent space in which such politics are negotiated.

This is particularly clear this year, given that Washington was notably absent from early Emmy campaigning, despite having been part of roundtables for both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety the previous year. This led to a Hollywood Reporter cover featuring the year’s top actresses, all of whom were white, and a Variety roundtable featuring six different lead actress contenders, all of whom were also white. Washington’s absence—likely tied to the fact she gave birth to her first child earlier this spring—offers a stark reminder that if not for Washington, there would be no women of color competitive in her category.

This is not to say that there are no other women of color submitted in the category: the official Emmy ballots revealed six, including Being Mary Jane’s Gabrielle Union, Sleepy Hollow’s Nicole Beharie, Elementary’s Lucy Liu, Nikita’s Maggie Q, and The Fosters’ Sherri Saum and Cierra Ramirez. Eliding for a moment the depressing statistic that only seven of the fifty-six women in the category are women of color, there are other reasons these women have been less visible than their counterparts. Issues of genre, network/channel branding, and cultural hierarchies of taste all make series like these less likely to draw Emmys in a dramatic field dominated by prestige cable dramas or network dramas with prestige cable auspices.

However, this does not necessarily exclude these women from participating in roundtables with major trade publications, provided their publicists—either associated with the network, studio, or the actress herself—work hard to get them there. Features like the Hollywood Reporter cover are competitive by nature, a coup for a publicist working hard to prove their worth to their client. But if you don’t have a publicist or agent who has played the Emmy game, or if you’re part of a show on a cable channel like BET with limited experience Emmy campaigning, there’s a good chance you will not be represented. And even if Gabrielle Union’s publicist had pushed for her to be included in one of these roundtables, would anyone have taken Union as a serious contender, given the low cultural standing of BET compared to the networks and channels dominant in the roundtables?

As Dear Black Woman reminds us, these realities do not render these situations ideologically neutral, because the optics they create are real, and offer a stark reminder of the state of diversity in not only the Emmys but in television more broadly. Rather, such considerations highlight how the Emmy nominating process functions as the intersection of multiple spaces of industry practice, each equally disinterested in confronting issues of diversity in a meaningful way unless someone like Washington emerges who fits the other requirements—a successful series, a reputable network, a strong publicity team—dominant in those spaces.

We can extend this into the submissions process itself. Transitioning to issues of gender, three examples stand out among the series and performers submitted for consideration. In the case of Amy Schumer, star and executive producer of Comedy Central’s sketch comedy series Inside Amy Schumer, she’s forced to compete in the Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series category due to rules surrounding variety series. Although she is unlikely to garner a nomination in either category, the optics of the ballot push her into a supporting role on a show based around her comedy, and which in its appeal to female viewers signifies a meaningful shift in Comedy Central’s brand identity.

In other cases, Emmy campaigns reinforce broader readings of a series’ gender politics. HBO’s Silicon Valley focuses its satire on the male-dominated technology field, and in its short first season featured only one supporting female character in Monica, played by Amanda Crew. And although the show drew significant criticism for its engagement with gender, HBO nonetheless chose to submit every other credited actor in the series for Emmy consideration without submitting Crew, making it their only series without an acting submission from each gender. The chances of Crew being nominated are slim to none, but the optics of not even submitting her don’t seem worth the money saved with one less submission among their extensive slate.

In the case of FX’s Fargo, broader channel strategy intersects with gender in problematic ways. Although Allison Tolman has been cited as the series’ lead actress in interviews with its creator, she is submitted as a supporting actress, a category she won at the recent Critics’ Choice Television Awards. There is an awards logic to this decision: Tolman is a newcomer without the name recognition of those likely to compete in Lead Actress, plus FX has a better shot in that category with American Horror Story’s Jessica Lange. And yet this strategy marginalizes Tolman to a lesser category (which was nearly eliminated last year), and pitches Fargo as a show with two male leads (Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman), which is notable given how some critics felt the finale worked to marginalize her character.

While the ideological dimensions of Emmy campaigning are made visible in trade publications, the same dimensions in Emmy submissions need to be excavated, and depending on the nominations may never make it past the ballots. However, exploring these questions reinforces that our understanding of the politics of the Emmys is not only driven by who is nominated or wins, but by how issues of race and gender are negotiated in the processes that lead to those results.

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, while it would be ill advised to overemphasize the importance of the Emmy Awards, this year’s nominations have been identified as a bellwether moment for Netflix’s original content and “Internet television” in general. The New York Times headlined its Emmys report with the innocuous “Netflix Does Well in 2013 Primetime Emmy Nominations.” Variety went with “Emmys Recognize Digital Age as Netflix Crashes The Party.” They’re both headlines that read as though they were written in advance, a clear narrative for journalists to latch onto to sell this year’s Emmy nominations as “important,” knowing Netflix was likely to compete with House of Cards and Arrested Development—House of Cards proved the big winner, earning nominations for Outstanding Drama Series, Lead Actor in a Drama Series, and Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Before the nominations were even announced, Academy chair Bruce Rosenblum acknowledged this narrative, citing the usual boilerplate about television changing into a multi-platform experience in his introduction to the live nominations announcement.

While acknowledging that Netflix’s rise is noteworthy, I reject its ties to the narrative of online television for two reasons. First and foremost, it is meaningful that the series Netflix submitted for consideration—which also included Hemlock Grove, and which earned a total of 14 nominations—are in no significant way a departure from traditional forms of television content. House of Cards is a premium cable drama series being distributed by Netflix; Arrested Development is a broadcast comedy turned premium cable comedy being distributed by Netflix. While there is clear innovation in terms of how these shows are reaching audiences, and I’ll acknowledge that Arrested Development’s puzzle-like structure is uniquely suited to that distribution model, we’re still considering series that would be strikingly familiar to Emmy voters.

These are not nominations for webseries like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, competing in categories specifically designed for web-based content. Julia Stiles was not nominated as Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Blue, a webseries distributed through the FOX-owned WIGS YouTube channel. There was actually a “webseries” nominated in a non-special class category: Machinima’s Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn earned a nomination for Outstanding Main Title Sequence, a nomination that oddly enough isn’t mentioned by Variety or The New York Times. Although I understand why Netflix is garnering the attention, to suggest that the Emmys are recognizing the digital age based on a showy drama series starring Kevin Spacey and produced by David Fincher, or a comedy series that was nominated for three-consecutive years in its previous life on broadcast, is to suggest that the Emmys simply acknowledging you can access the medium of television online outside of special class categories is itself remarkable. This seems like a low bar, and one that obscures the range of diverse and innovative forms being developed in an online space, and being mostly ignored by the Academy.

The other caveat necessary when considering the impact of Netflix’s nominations is that its distinct mode of distribution would have been erased for many Emmy voters. Netflix sent out screener DVDs of both House of Cards and Arrested Development to Emmy voters, meaning they never had to confront their status as “internet television” as they sampled series submitted for consideration. Additionally, online screening options have been available from networks like FOX or NBC for a number of years, which means that more technologically savvy Emmy voters are already used to streaming television (thereby erasing the only significant sense of difference tied to the Netflix series). While we can read the narrative of the Emmys embracing online television based on the basic fact of their nominations, the actual process through which Netflix earned those nominations did not necessarily carry the same narrative.

Comparisons have been drawn between Netflix’s breakthrough and that of premium and basic cable channels, which are still establishing “firsts”: Louie, for instance, is the first basic cable comedy to earn a nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series. However, as the difference between forms of distribution continues to collapse—especially for Emmy voters who receive DVDs or online streams stripped of commercials—we are no longer in an era where distribution is in and of itself a stigma facing television programs that otherwise tick off the Emmy boxes. Rather, the Emmys are a battle between brands as individual networks and channels seek to associate themselves with the prestige necessary to earn an Emmy nomination. Netflix didn’t earn Emmy nominations by stressing its sense of difference, but rather by erasing that difference, developing series that matched contemporary, popular conceptions of what qualifies as television prestige.

It is hard for me to accept this as a bellwether moment for online television when Netflix’s success is based on their ability to disassociate themselves with the notion of online television. Their success was not in breaking down barriers for new forms of distribution, but in finding a way to successfully convince Emmy voters those barriers did not apply to them. For evidence of this, one need look no further than the official “Facts and Figures” document released by the TV Academy: despite all this discussion about online television, Netflix is categorized alongside AMC and HBO as a cable channel despite the existence of a broadband category, which is exactly what Netflix intended and the narrative we should be taking away from these nominations.

 
Matthew J. Smith, Wittenberg University:

Curatorial. It’s a curious word that I must admit I don’t recall having used myself to describe anything that I do as a teacher of media, but it’s one a number of the presenters involved in the Faculty Seminar used to describe their roles in selecting and presenting materials for and about television. I had never thought of the work of television producers as likened to the informed discretion of museum and art gallery directors, but the usage makes perfect sense now. Each selection in terms of what goes into a finished television production is borne of that curatorial sensibility, as producers make paradigmatic choices among a host of alternatives and exercise their insight to achieve a product that—when at its best—proves to help storytelling reach its ideal impact.

As I thought more about our week, curatorial also seems to be a perfect term to describe the avocations of many elements of the experience. When we arrived at the Academy headquarters at the start of the seminar, our first stop was the “Hall of Fame Plaza” where statues, busts, and reliefs of some of the most potent figures in television history were thoughtfully laid out over an acre of North Hollywood real estate. We also met employees of the Academy whose job it was to preserve the history of the medium. Karen Herman heads the Archive of American Television, a phenomenal oral history project whose fruits are online and available at the click of a mouse. There was John Leverence, Vice President of Awards, who has coordinated the primetime Emmys since the early 1980s. He introduced us to the history of the statuette and the awards program. And then there was our trip to Warner Bros. Studios, where our guide, production designer John Shaffner, gave us a tour of the historic studio. Outside each sound stage hangs a plaque commemorating the individual television series produced therein, including one where Shaffner had designed the sets for Friends.

Although much of our week was focused on how television is produced and where it might go next, I was gratified to encounter a good deal of the history of how we got to this point. I’m happy to curate such experiences into my own teaching of the medium and its history henceforth.

Todd Sodano, St. John Fisher College:

Over the last decade, storytellers have flocked to HBO, Showtime, Starz, and Cinemax, not merely because of premium cable networks’ inherent freedom to use strong language, sexual content, and brutal violence. Rather, their freedom to tell a compelling story on those platforms is paramount. Jenni Sherwood, senior vice president of development and production at HBO, said on a panel focusing on HBO’s Game Change that decisions at her network are made based on a script: “Where is the intelligence in this? [Where is] the creativity? How is it going to be received?” Neither she nor anybody else who works in cable and who spoke at the Faculty Seminar yearns to offer nudity, language, or violence simply because they can. Greg Yaitanes, showrunner of the forthcoming Cinemax series Banshee, said these elements “come from a place of character or story.” HBO painfully learned more than a decade ago (see The Mind of the Married Men – actually, don’t see it) that having four men speak candidly about sex and relationships wasn’t a recipe for instant success just because it mirrored the spirit of Sex and the City.

Variety’s Brian Lowry, who moderated the showrunner panel discussion with Yaitanes, Cynthia Cidre (TNT’s Dallas) and DeAnn Heline (ABC’s The Middle), acknowledged that writers boast how the best part of working in pay cable is not having act breaks. In advertiser-supported television, the tail (commercials) wags the dog (programming); conforming to this traditional structure can challenge and frustrate the writer. Yaitanes, who used to run Fox’s House, said that, as a writer, eventually “you start thinking you’re there to fill in the spaces between the ad breaks.” The ability to pursue narratives that avoid the six-act structure is strong incentive for storytellers. Starz CEO Chris Albrecht (formerly of HBO) told Lowry that the absence of the ad breaks was the most important freedom on his old network. Perhaps one of the most important lessons to pass along to our students who are pursuing careers in film and television is to understand storytelling and structures. Cidre declared, “Structure is key. Who wants what, and who’s keeping them from getting it? This is the basic structure of everything.”

Randy Caspersen, Northern Illinois University:

Each of my visits to Los Angeles becomes more bittersweet than the last. I lived there for nine years where I worked in television production. My best friends still live there. While I was making new friends and learning a ton about television biz at the Academy of Television Art & Sciences Foundations Faculty Seminar by day, I moonlit with friends at night. One, a big producer on the biggest new competition show on television, launched me into the audience of a live taping. Another friend, a make-up artist for the highest-rated show in syndication, recounted her recent staph infection from breast expanders after her double mastectomy. My oldest friend, a beloved roommate from college undergraduate days, told me about how he has been unemployed on and off and just borrowed $300 from his parents while standing in front of his bookcase which uses two of his three Emmys as bookends.

When I returned to Northern Illinois University, I prepared my lecture for my Introduction to Studio Production students with two slides. The first is a “Greetings from Los Angeles” postcard circa 1940’s which shows the city name in block letters with the city’s famous buildings illustrated inside each letter. The second slide, a modern re-imagining of the same, filled the letters in with cartoony portraits of a drug bust, police chase, an overdone plastic surgery victim, an overcrowded freeway and a prostitute on Hollywood Boulevard. I launched into my lecture about the great things I saw during the Academy’s seminar—the showrunners, the above- and below-the-line job panels, the tours of studios and special effects houses, the fever surrounding emerging technologies—along with the caveat that there is a dark side to this land of dreams.

We got a lot of advice to bring home to our students from the very talented industry professionals. Internships are a great start. You must start at the bottom, work your way up through the ranks and hold out for a decent job for at least a ten-year period. The key thread to everything—whether you are the production designer for The Big Bang Theory or the showrunner for Dallas or the DP for American Horror Story—was that everyone is storyteller at heart and that television is no longer cinema’s simpler, uglier sister.

My students still wonder: what is that “dark side of LA” and “how am I going to make it?” I wonder that question, too. I left the city because I never saw myself “making it” even though I was a producer on a hit show. Maybe the greatest lesson of the seminar came from Nashville executive producer R.J. Cutler who said, crude paraphrasing here, that the people who make it aren’t the geniuses but those who are willing to stick it out over time and work the connections they made when they first came to town. He said genuine curiosity into how human beings behave continues to drive him toward creating non-fiction and narrative media. Oh, yeah, and if you make it, there is big money in that creation. I guess the dark truth of LA is that it will always be looking for how it can monetize all creative media pursuits. And so it is nice to visit Los Angeles and also nice to leave.

At the end of the day, though, they highlight the fact that the Emmy Awards are a broadcast event, and therefore must be concerned with keeping the attention of broadcast viewers. And in the current televisual age, that means organizing the show in ways that emphasize what wide audiences are actually watching or interested in. Accordingly, the emphasis on presenters (as opposed to what they were presenting) in these on-screen prompts fits in with a larger strategy of making a niche celebration of television production culture seem like a celebration of capital-T Television that viewers across the nation can relate to.

The challenge for Emmy producers is that they are forced to complete this same task with different nominees every year, which requires certain adjustments. In recent years, after the era of The West Wing and The Sopranos, the drama categories have been dominated by shows that most people aren’t watching, with the little-watched Mad Men winning four straight Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series and Lead Actor seeing similar domination from Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. By comparison, comedy has exited a dark period where niche or low-rated comedies like The Office and 30 Rock walked away with the trophy, as Modern Family offers a populist hit with comparatively mass appeal (although its total viewer numbers pale in comparison to the sitcoms dominating its category a decade earlier).

Accordingly, comedy categories opened and closed this year’s Emmy telecast, despite the fact that the only interesting story was happening in the dramatic categories. For those who actually follow the awards, and for whom the evening is a suspenseful reveal after months of speculation, Homeland’s win for Outstanding Drama Series, Lead Actor and Actress in a Drama Series, and Writing in a Drama Series was the story of the evening. Not only does it dethrone Mad Men after its four-year reign and mark the first time since 1993 that a series has won Series, Lead Actor and Lead Actress in a single year, but it also signals Showtime’s first ever Series win at the Emmys, becoming only the third cable channel to win a Series award (after HBO and AMC). But Homeland draws a small audience, limited by access to premium cable, and so Modern Family’s predictable win for Outstanding Comedy Series closes the evening as a celebration of television that people watching have actually seen (and, not entirely coincidentally, television on the broadcast network that happened to be airing this year’s Emmy telecast).

This seems to fly in the face of the prevailing discourse surrounding the current era of television, which is often heralded for its serious dramatic programming—most often on cable—by those who suggest we are in a golden age (a notion Damian Lewis echoed in his speech, making me reach for the bingo card I drew into the back of my copy of Newman and Levine’s Legitimating Television); However, while the very existence of the Emmys as a judgment of art would seem to offer proof of this claim, the Emmys telecast can actively work against the exclusivity of those definitions. Although no broadcast series made it into the Outstanding Drama Series category, eight made it into the montage of eighteen series that marked the beginning of the drama period of the telecast, only one of which was nominated for a single award given out during that telecast (CBS’ The Good Wife, with three acting nominations). And yet House, Once Upon a Time, Grey’s Anatomy, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Revenge, Smash, and NCIS all have something in common: more people have probably seen them than any of the series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series. Heck, more people watch NCIS weekly than the six shows nominated in that category combined.

These montages may not seem as important as the winners, and they certainly aren’t likely to be part of news reports or historical records regarding the telecast, but they capture a different way in which the Emmys serve as a discursive space for the contested meaning of television quality. Although we normally think about winners and losers, or even nominees, as the primary space in which the Emmys reinforce or establish certain hierarchies of quality, we also need to think about the broadcast itself as a push back against those hierarchies, particularly given the ongoing battle between the broadcast networks and the Academy regarding the Movie/Miniseries category (which privileges HBO, who won four out of seven awards in the category, with the other two going to basic cable programs). Next year, the Supporting Acting categories for Movies and Miniseries are disappearing, leaving more time for genres that remain part of the industrial structures of broadcast television, and therefore genres that the networks paying to air the awards are more invested in.

In other words, it wasn’t a coincidence that only three of the eighteen series featured during the broadcast’s comedy montage were from cable networks (and all of them from HBO, with no representation from nominated series from Showtime—Nurse Jackie—and FX—Louie—within the evening’s broadcast). It was a statement that comedy is and always will be a broadcast genre, even though they could have easily selected another six great cable comedies to achieve the relative parity they sought in drama series. Like the choice to lead and close with comedy, it’s the broadcast networks’ way of marking their territory: while the battle for drama might seem lost, the war for comedy wages on, and it will be fought in the editing bays and production booths as much as in the voting ballots.

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.