On this week’s edition of the Deadline podcast series TV Talk, television critic Dominic Patten and awards columnist Pete Hammond take on network broadcast TV’s Emmy dilemma.
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Although the Television Academy heavily relies on fees from the four broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox) who share the annual Primetime Emmy telecast on a rotating wheel, it is each of those networks that benefit the least from Emmy attention in the major marquee categories of Drama, Comedy, Limited Series and other categories.
These days, th top categories almost exclusively cater to pay-cable networks like HBO or streamers like Netflix, Apple, Hulu, Amazon and others who have simply — and successfully — crashed and taken over bragging rights for TV’s most valued award, which when the wheel with rights to telecast the Emmys was originally created, was dominated by nominees and winners from those TV networks. My how times have changed.
For instance, in Drama Series, only NBC’s This Is Us in recent years has been able to crack the code. Comedy is not much better, and you can forget about Limited Series and TV Movie, both once dominated by the nets.
NBC’s limited series with double Oscar winner Renée Zellweger, The Thing About Pam, is in fact the rare network limited series looking to get into the game this season, almost an aberration. ABC has Women of the Movement, but these are long shots in a field dominated now by streaming entities and HBO. Of course there are categories where the networks still compete (SNL, are you listening?) but it ain’t what it used to be.
We examine the outlook for networks and the Emmys to see if the tide can ever be turned, and what the mind-set of voters is now.
As we head deeper into the Emmys battlefronts, remember to subscribe to Deadline’sTV Talk podcast at Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.