Only a few surprises: “Succession” and “Ted Lasso” win at the Emmys

Few surprises
“Succession” and “Ted Lasso” Win Emmys

9/13/2022 7:53 AM

(Almost) all the same at this year’s Emmy Awards in the US. Numerous TV and streaming series winners have already won awards. In addition to “Succession” and “Ted Lasso”, the miniseries “The White Lotus” was successful.

In the American entertainment industry, a discussion has been raging for months: who should actually watch all this? With hundreds of broadcast and cable channels and half a dozen streaming providers from Netflix, Hulu and HBO to Disney, Apple and Amazon, many think viewers are long lost. Monday night’s 74th Emmy Awards in Los Angeles gave the industry a chance to reset its inner compass. But at the end of the three-hour ceremony, one thing is clear: The nearly 20,000 voters at the Television Academy currently have no clear fixed point — and they find it hard to appreciate anything new. Instead, the winners are widespread and often known.

Series that already won in the main categories of the evening: The black humorous media and family satire “Succession” won as best drama as in 2020, the heartfelt football series “Ted Lasso” received the Emmy as best comedy as in 2021. They had the prevailed against newer and often bolder material — for example, the bleak South Korean social critique “Squid Game” could have won for the first time in a non-English drama. For the hit comedy “Abbott Elementary” about life in an underfunded school, there were ultimately more consolation prizes in the screenplay and supporting roles categories.

Three of the four lead actor awards also went to stars who have already won these awards for their roles: Jason Sudeikis in the title role of “Ted Lasso” as an American soccer coach in charge of a British team, and Jean Smart as the aging comedienne in “Hacks” had already won in 2021. Zendaya, still a newcomer at the age of 26, already won the lead role Rue in 2020 in the relentless teen drama ‘Euphoria’. Only South Korea’s Lee Jung-Jae in “Squid Game” as Best Drama Actor was a surprise – impossible to determine whether the co-nominated “Succession” actors Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong stole each other’s votes.

Miniseries “The White Lotus” brightens up

In the recently increasingly important miniseries and television movie awards category, “The White Lotus” was the big winner, taking home ten awards – more than any other format this year. The Christmas satire about a murder and many special requests from the super-rich at a luxury Hawaiian resort took home awards for Best Miniseries, Best Director and Best Screenplay in a Miniseries, as well as Best Supporting Actor Murray Bartlett and Jennifer Coolidge.

There were well-known winners in many other subcategories: John Oliver won for the seventh time in a row for his sketch news program “Last Week Tonight” as best entertainment talk show. And the “Black Lady Sketch Show” couldn’t do anything against the regular winner “Saturday Night Live”: “SNL” won the category for the best entertainment sketch series, which was only introduced in 2015, for the sixth time in a row . According to the IMDB database, the live comedy, which has been running since 1975, now has 87 Emmys with more than 300 nominations.

NBC does a lot of self-promotion

The three-hour awards ceremony was also slowed down by lengthy self-advertising for US broadcaster NBC productions, an excessive amount of prescription chatter by the laudators, and a car ad billed as a sketch clip. Also, the decision to have the stars sit at round tables rather than in rows more than once meant there was no CCTV footage of the nominees’ immediate reactions to winning or losing.

The audience in the room gladly accepted any offer of a breath of fresh air. Singer and presenter Lizzo won the prize for the best competition program, beating the favorite “Ru Paul’s Drag Race”. Her show “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls” is about 13 overweight women who struggle to become professional dancers. “The stories they share with us aren’t that special, they just don’t get a platform,” said Lizzo while accepting her Emmy, adding: “All I wanted as a little girl was a girl like me in see the media. Fat like me. Black like me. Beautiful like me.” The 2022 Emmy Awards met this desire for diversity only very sporadically.