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.

Either by good luck or design, Veep hit the airways just as the political discussion was shifting from the Republican primary race to speculation about who Mitt Romney would select as a running mate. A Google news search for the word “veep” leads to a nearly equal selection of stories about the HBO series and Romney’s “veepstakes,” certainly an enviable position for HBO. Far from simply a matter of timeliness, the extent to which the discussions of Romney’s potential running mates focus on optics, personal politics and risk management undermines the claims of the chorus of political pundits declaring Veep unrepresentative of the actual political environment. While on its surface Veep is standard bawdy sitcom fare, with the politics taking backseat to the prat falls, underneath this surface a bitter truth about politics sits quietly.

Much of Veep focuses on exceptionally small things as opposed to the the earth-shattering, life changing politics of  the New Deal or a new tax cut, more interested in crisis management and small-scale political maneuvering. While the politics of photo-ops, for example, lack the gravitas of The West Wing or even the similarly comedic Battleground, it is nonetheless a very real part of politics in the age of 24 hour news. Even as Veep’s first episode, which focuses largely on the fallout of an offensive tweet and subsequent joke, was criticized for being unrealistic and overly cynical, those critics concurrently rehashed the firestorm surrounding a controversial remark from commentator Hillary Rosen. Rosen’s comment about Ann Romney’s lack of work history had no policy effects of any kind and had been retracted by Rosen by the time the Sunday shows devoted significant portions of their program to discussing it. Despite pious claims to the contrary, optics and the trivial are—for better or worse—a significant part of American political life; the discomfort brought about by Veep’s skewering of this portion of American politics has perhaps more relevance than solemn programs which deny this reality.

In fact, Veep could be seen as part of a larger trend on HBO towards more realist, politically or socially relevant programming. Having found success with the fantastic with programs like True Blood and Game of Thrones, made-for-television movie Game Change ushered in a season of politically themed fictional programming on HBO. Game Change, chronicling the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin, may have drawn extensive criticism from—largely Republican—commentators, but it also was seen by 3.6 million viewers during its first weekend, making it the highest-rated original movie on HBO in nearly a decade. With Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina dressed all in red in the first episode of Veep and caught in the midst of a Twitter scandal, Game Change may even have served as a stealth roll out for Veep‘s April premiere. Like Veep, Game Change is very much about the behind-the-scenes manipulations that take place in hopes of controlling political optics, and similarly speaks to American fears that behind closed doors our political figures may be bumbling, vain, and feckless.

Meanwhile, HBO is also interested in how these politics are being refracted through the media given the upcoming arrival of Aaron Sorkin’s latest behind-the-scenes drama series, Newsroom. HBO is airing the series’ trailers as bookends for each episode of Veep, suggesting that topicality rather than tone will help move audiences across these programs (and continue their HBO subscriptions through the summer). Newsroom follows a cable news program whose anchor has decided to bring honor back to the news by becoming an Edward R. Murrow-like figure that dispenses with fluff and objectionable politics for hard news. Sorkin’s television programs tend to feature characters who are imperfect but deeply honorable, and he seems to be bringing this redemptive vision not only to the frequently censured genre of cable news, but also to the increasingly invisible figure of the moderate Republican. While it is unlikely that Sorkin’s choice of a Republican for his main character will make it any more palatable to the conservatives that condemned Game Change, it could allow for a deeper and potentially more optimistic view into the divided American political system.

While Veep leaves political party up to the imagination to allow for a more resounding condemnation of American politics, Newsroom seems to deploy it to support its image of passion and redemption, of political figures who are not venal but virtuous. Whether this new crop of politically oriented programming will pay off for HBO is very much an open question, but the mixture of frustration, cynicism, and optimism that characterize this cycle of programs is quite relevant to our political time.