Surrounded by her political enemies on all sides, Genevieve O’Reilly denounces genocide and propaganda and advocates for the importance of truth and independence in a speech that will inspire the rebellion that takes down the the Galactic Empire. Jacob Anderson tears into the undead flesh of the enemies who murdered his daughter, channeling his pain and fury into a series of increasingly gruesome vampiric assassinations. Danny McBride, Edi Patterson, and Adam DeVine excoriate their widowed father for sleeping with women after their mother’s death; McBride says with shock — and a little bit of respect — that he is surprised the old man can still “do comes.”
Andor, Interview with the Vampire, and The Righteous Gemstones offered some of the most poignant, visceral, and unforgettable television scenes of the year. But according to the 2025 Emmy voters, they paled in comparison to the rich-people problems plaguing the characters of The White Lotus, or the inside-baseball showbiz hysteria of The Studio. And thus, on Emmy nom morning, The White Lotus and fellow Emmys favorite Severance each snagged three nominations in Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, filling six of the seven available nomination slots, and The White Lotus grabbed four of seven in Supporting Actress in a Drama. Things get positively ludicrous in Guest Actor in a Comedy Series, where nods for The Studio’s Bryan Cranston, Dave Franco, Ron Howard, Anthony Mackie, and Martin Scorsese playing versions of themselves account for five of six nominations. (Admittedly, I would love it if my man Marty won an Emmy; he’d then have as many Emmys with his name on them as Oscars, which, yes, is insane.) Andor received 14 nominations, IWTV two, and Gemstones six, but none of them received nods in the primary acting categories.
The Emmys continue to saturate the zone with their favorite shows, clogging up the supporting performance categories (and sometimes even lead, or writing and directing) with the same titles in a single year, edging out exemplary performances on shows with less mainstream buzz or less robustly funded Emmys campaigns. I have to assume that voters simply aren’t watching as many shows as they should be to get a real sense of the television landscape. But there’s an easy solution to this, one I suggested back in 2022 after the Limited Series performance categories singled out the same five series amidst a powerful field of contenders. What I’m suggesting, of course, is mandated diversity, a concept that our governing politicians are trying to stamp out in the most evil ways possible and to which I cling in this instance — and basically all instances, actually.
The Emmys need a nomination ceiling. If the TV Academy were to enact a nominee-limitation rule per series, that could force voters to check out shows they normally wouldn’t and consider actors they normally wouldn’t. Back in 2022, I suggested the Emmys mandate one acting nominee per series. I am feeling more generous now and will suggest a maximum of two performers from the same show in each supporting category, since those categories have the capacity to allot eight total nominations anyway. Two out of eight — that’s 25 percent! A respectable rate signifying that Emmy voters like a thing, rather than liking only that thing.
I brought my proposal to TV Academy president Maury McIntyre, who suggests the preponderance of nominations for The White Lotus and The Studio is due to the buzz they got this year. “When you get a show that is so known for its ensemble, you get a little bit of a halo for everybody in that,” he acknowledges. “You know, people were predicting The White Lotus was going to get more nominations than it got. But from our perspective, it’s more about, Is there anything in the data, in terms of the vote, that causes us concern? Or is this actually the vote? And if it’s the vote, that is who the performers have chosen as their nominee.”
In 2023, a rule change meant voters could only nominate the number of performers who would ultimately appear on the ballot (this process changed a lot over the years, and from 2017–2023, voters could select as many performers as they wanted for a single category). That was intended to force voters into difficult initial choices because the Academy was beginning to see a “kind of flattening,” McIntyre explains. “You could go in and say, ‘I loved everybody in this show,’ or ‘I loved all of these shows from this distributor,’ and you weren’t necessarily putting any kind of judicious or analytical mind into it because you didn’t have to. Now you are picking who you are saying the nominee should be, and that means you can’t just pick everything.”
McIntyre thinks the rule change has been “incremental” in opening up nominations to different series. “It’s always going to be challenging to go against the zeitgeist,” he tells me. “If the show has a zeitgeist moment, it is going to get a number of nominations, no matter what.” No one within the voting body has complained about certain shows dominating the Supporting and Guest performance categories, he adds, but he still offers to game out what a rule change of the magnitude I’m suggesting would look like. It’s not impossible!
The performers’ elected peer group governors and an associated Executive Committee would have to draft a potential change and take it to the Academy’s Awards Committee, which would then review the proposed change and decide whether to recommend it to the Board of Governors for a vote. The proposal could pass or fail; if the latter, the peer group governors could bring up the issue again in the future. A broader change that affects all categories would probably start from the Academy’s Awards Committee itself, who would then take it to the Board of Governors, McIntyre explains.
If my rule were to be implemented and voters could only vote for two performers per show per category, based on how the votes shake out, four different performers from the same show probably could still make it in, McIntyre points out. “It’s an interesting question, but for me, it comes down to: If you really wanna compare everybody, why wouldn’t you compare everybody instead of saying you can only compare a select number?” he asks. For McIntyre, “the press itself has a lot to do” with the overwhelming dominance of certain series. “I’ve certainly heard the frustration from the trades,” he says, laughing. “The press will say, ‘We think they’re going to vote on these top five,’ and of course, then everybody goes, ‘Oh, is that who I should be looking at?’ It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t see a way around that. In some ways you wanna go, ‘Can you just not have any lists before we vote?’”
Putting aside the potential question of whether us writers are the bad guys, actually, it’s undeniable that this problem has been exacerbated recently thanks to well-funded series with broad ensembles. In the last decade, The White Lotus, Succession, Severance, Ted Lasso, and The Handmaid’s Tale have all had years where they were the majority of Supporting performance nominees, or even the totality of them. At the 75th Emmys in January 2024, the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series nominees were four guys from Succession and four guys from The White Lotus. But this is actually a long-running pattern in the Emmys, all the way back to the 1980s and 1990s; as my colleague Joe Reid pointed out to me, in 1982, all five Supporting Actor in a Drama nominees were from Hill Street Blues. In the 1990s, ER and NYPD Blue were dominant, with both series taking up multiple Lead Actor, Lead Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress spots. (In 1996, the Lead Actor nominees were George Clooney and Anthony Edwards from ER, Dennis Franz and Jimmy Smits from NYPD Blue, and Andre Braugher from Homicide: Life on the Street — a group of five who would continue to appear as nominees on and off for years to come.) In the aughts, The West Wing, The Sopranos, and Modern Family would pop up over and over again. In 2001, three of the five Supporting Actor in a Drama nominees were from The West Wing and two were from The Sopranos, and the next year, The West Wing would bump up to four of six nominees in that category. Over in comedy, Desperate Housewives ruled; in 2005, three of five Outstanding Lead Actress nominees belonged to that show.
McIntyre acknowledges that there’s no real way to check how many of the submissions Emmy voters are watching, but emphasizes that through the Academy’s online viewing platform, Emmy Magazine, and screening events, the organization is “trying to actually broaden people’s horizons.” Those are admirable efforts, but the reality is that the TV landscape today is phenomenally changed. Even with the post-strike shrinking of the industry, we’re no longer living in a world where the same couple of networks and streamers are the only platforms offering up quality TV, and we should no longer settle for the idea that excellence is the provenance of only a few series. Set a maximum nomination limit per series and encourage voters to break free of the monocultures to which they cling. Get them to watch other series from other genres and other networks. Nothing about the awards ecosystem is fair, but such a rule change would help us inch a little bit closer to the illusion of parity. The entire point of an ensemble is to give varied actors the opportunity to shine. TV Academy members should apply that ideology to their own voting practices, too.
