The Emmy nominees make a solid case for supporting striking writers and actors
If you liked this year’s Emmy-nominated shows, you may want to support striking writers. Photo by Frederic J. Brown/Getty Images/Contributor
By PJ Grisar July 12, 2023
Let’s address the 600-pound bear in the room — no, not the chef show.
The nominees for the 2023 Emmys are coming to us mid-writers’ strike and a day after an unnamed studio executive told Deadline that the current strategy for handling labor negotiations is to “to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
They also arrive on the day when SAG-AFTRA, the union for screen actors, is meeting with mediators and, if they fail to reach an agreement by midnight, they, too, will go on strike. (SAG president Fran Drescher was blasted for jet setting to Italy with the deadline looming).
In short, it’s not the most festive of climates to learn of your nomination, but it is strikingly appropriate for the work being nominated.
Succession, a dirt bath in corporate media greed, is nominated for 27 Emmys. Barry, about an assassin-turned-actor’s desperation, is nominated for best comedy series for its valedictory season. The Last of Us, a bleak fungal-zombie apocalypse based on the game developed by Israeli video game exec Neil Druckmann, is up for 24 awards with its sobering look at haves and have-nots. And, for reasons that make me question my sense of humor, The Bear, which follows the hardscrabble struggle of an artist chef, has 13 nominations in the comedy category.
Perhaps we’re looking at what Balzac called the comédie humaine, as the crop of shows can’t be neatly sorted into genres. For every laugh, there’s a twinge of social consciousness and many of last season’s saddest moments carry with them an air of absurdity. Art mirrors life. Would comedy writer Quinta Brunson, nominated for her show Abbot Elementary, as a performer and creator, feel like laughing at the threat of rendering her comrades indigent? Jon Stewart, ever the wag and now nominated for his largely serious talk series The Problem, canceled his promo duties in May over the strike.
It’s a shame that Taffy Brodesser-Akner, in her first outing as a TV writer for Fleishman Is in Trouble, is nominated at a time where the industry is in free fall. Her latest tweets expressed gratitude for the nomination, but prayed “the studios will see to it we get a fair and equitable contract by Emmy-time, or perhaps sooner so that we can end the terrible, incendiary DEADLINE articles.” (An early one quipped, re: the Deadline article, “Let writers go broke” would be a more effective tactic for an endgame if it hadn’t been their pre-game, too.”)
Jewish performers are well-represented in acting categories, with Lizzy Caplan nominated for Fleishman, Jason Segal for Shrinking, Henry Winkler for Barry, Brett Goldstein for Ted Lasso and Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach for The Bear, and Natasha Lyonne and Judith Light for Poker Face. Daniel Radcliffe even has a nod for his turn as Weird Al Yankovic in a faux-biopic that, if made now, would almost certainly have a subplot about when the jokester in song was replaced by A.I. (“ChatGPT,” to the tune of “PYT” perhaps?)
Even The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, whose final season showed Midge’s labor exploited to make someone else’s (nominee Alex Borstein’s) bottom line, can’t take her bow uninterrupted by a chilling reminder of how little things have changed in showbiz.
The writers and actors whose work is being honored have, in a premise execs may be too unimaginative to realize, vindicated their fight. In nearly every nominee there is something that challenges a system — be it public schools, the courts, capitalism, a succession, a fascist galactic bureaucracy or the entertainment industry itself — and makes a case for the little guy.
I’m no lawyer like Saul Goodman (or a lawyer turned actor in a fake trial like the ones in the Emmy-nominated Jury Duty), but the roster of excellent Emmy nominees, and the possible eventuality of a boycotted or delayed ceremony, seem like a pretty strong closing argument.
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