There's a lot for TV junkies to celebrate in this year's list of Emmy nominees. Parks & Recreation scored a nomination for its final season. Tatiana Maslany finally got her long-awaited nod for Orphan Black. Even some haters got what they wanted: For the first time in years, both The Big Bang Theory and its star, perennial winner Jim Parsons, were shut out of their long-entrenched nominations. (Great job, Emmy voters! Now stop waving Modern Family through.)
As always, there were a few disappointing omissions — Penny Dreadful's Eva Green, Jane the Virgin's Gina Rodriguez, and literally anything for NBC's Hannibal — but overall, it feels like the Emmys are improving every year. Mocking Emmy voters for their mistakes is an annual ritual, but the list of nominees keeps improving, and there will never be a slate that satisfies everyone.
But on the customary list of surprises and snubs, one broader omission particularly rankles: the utter lack of support for FX's original drama slate, which included two of the strongest seasons that have aired on any network in 2015. The Americans landed two nominations: Outstanding Guest Actress (Margo Martindale) and Outstanding Writing For a Drama Series ("Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?"). That's absurdly low for one of the best shows on television. And still, it's better than Justified, which didn't land a single nod for its marvelous final season.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
On review aggregator Metacritic, the score for The Americans' most recent season is higher than any of the other nominees; Justified is topped only by the most recent season of Game of Thrones. But aging mediocrities like House of Cards, Homeland, and Downton Abbey, which don't belong within a mile of the conversation about TV's best dramas, get waved through every year despite their precipitous declines in both quality and acclaim.
FX was one of the pioneers of this much-heralded "golden age of television," but the network's long dearth of Emmy recognition belies its consistency and importance. The cop drama The Shield, which ran for seven terrific, influential seasons, won just one Emmy (in 2002, for star Michael Chiklis). The network's most popular and long-running shows — Nip/Tuck, Rescue Me, Sons of Anarchy — have made the smallest of blips on Emmy voters' radar. Most bafflingly, only one FX show has ever been nominated for Outstanding Drama: Damages, which landed back-to-back nods in 2008 and 2009. (There is, of course, one exception to this year's dearth of nominations for FX: American Horror Story, which routinely dominates the Outstanding Miniseries category, and was recently modernized as the Limited Series category. The latest season, Freakshow, pulled in 20 nominations, bring American Horror Story's total to 90 nominations over four seasons.)
But ridiculous as some of the Emmy voters' past FX omissions look today, they've never been worse than they are this year, when FX's two best dramas triumphed in two totally distinct ways. Coming off a minor letdown in its fifth season, Justified beat the odds to deliver a sixth season that's arguably its finest: a dense, twisty crime story that found the perfect endings for each of its characters. The Americans, by contrast, is in the middle of its overarching narrative, getting more fascinating and complicated with each passing episode. With any luck, The Americans will be as long-lived as Justified.
Of course, an Emmy nomination would be the perfect way to raise The Americans' profile — its ratings are middling at best — giving it a much-needed platform to reach a broader audience, and giving FX a good reason to keep it around. Justified deserved a victory lap, and The Americans deserves recognition for standing out in a very crowded slate of dramas.
Look, awards show are overanalyzed and overblown. But they're not totally meaningless, either. After they end, TV shows tend to stand the test of time when their successes are celebrated on a mass stage — and "Emmy-winning" stands out a lot more than "critically acclaimed."
