Some years, it can be a bit of a struggle to put together this introductory spiel, and some years the AMPTP has been so cartoonishly evil and buffoonishly overconfident in the face of one of the biggest strikes in Hollywood history that the Emmys were cancelled and rescheduled. In theory, these awards are a counterpoint to the Emmys, and we would usually have posted them a few days ago, the night before the “real” awards. Well, who’s real now, the Emmys? Not you! You’re not even happening ‘til January at the earliest and no one will give a shit because it’ll be Oscar season! You get nothing! You lose!
Fortunately for us, we won’t see the effects of the strike – or rather, the AMPTP’s refusal to give their workers’ fair conditions so long they needed to strike!!! – ‘til next year, because we’re here to pass judgement on the most recent TV season (June 2022 – May 2023). As well as the classic drama and comedy awards, we also have two awards for reality, variety and documentary television, including game shows, professional wrestling and whatever Eric Andre is doing at any given minute. We picked our winners by consensus, so only shows we both watched were eligible to win, but we each picked a runner-up, regardless of whether the other has seen it.
You can find each of our full slates of nominees at the bottom of the post. We recommend checking them out if you’re looking for recommendations.
(Also, we don’t normally say this and it’s never been a problem before, but just so no one can say we didn’t warn them: we thoroughly spoil the shows we write about. If you don’t want to know what happens in the final seasons of Succession and Barry, turn back now!)
DRAMA
OUTSTANDING DRAMA SERIES – Succession
Dean: “I caught up on Succession just in time for it to go out on one of the best seasons of television ever made, which is handy because it was without a doubt the best drama of the last year and giving this award to anything else would have felt really embarrassing in retrospect if I’d caught up later.
What can I say about the final season of Succession that hasn’t been said a hundred times before? Nothing, probably, so I’ll just say what I want. There’s a bit in the final episode where Roman and Kendall hug, and Roman has this stitched-up wound on his head he’s been worrying about all day, and Kendall holds Roman’s head so tight against his shoulder his stitches burst. It’s a testament to how richly textured this show was, right to the very end, that I saw spirited debate after the finale about whether this was Kendall being cruel to Roman or giving his masochistic little brother what he needed but couldn’t ask for, whether it was Roman himself who initiated by pulling himself into Ken’s shoulder, whether either of them was trying to burst the stitches or it was just a happy accident, and so on.
Every scene, every moment, in the last season of Succession, is just as densely layered with spoken and unspoken things, lovingly crafted by a cast and creative team working in such perfect sync that mere collaboration gave way to pure alchemy. If you haven’t watched it yet, I promise it’s as good as you’ve heard, and better.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Poker Face – “A century ago or so, Danny Lavery wrote an article making the case for Columbo becoming an American Doctor Who, rebooting every ten to fifteen years with a new actor in the role. I erroneously believed, for all these years, that Lavery put Natasha Lyonne on the list of potential candidates – because of course, right? And finally, here we are: Lyonne plays a human lie detector on the run, solving murders we already know the answer to. I hope it runs for thirty years.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Primal – “Though Primal will live on as an anthology series, its second season brought the tale of Spear and Fang to a fantastically bittersweet conclusion, as our wandering Neanderthal-Tyrannosaurus duo left their native land of prehistoric monsters for new adventures in ancient Europe, Asia and Africa. The best show Genndy Tartakovsky ever made, one of the best animated series ever, and one of the best shows of the year.”
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OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR IN A DRAMA – Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy in Succession
Ciara: “Roman’s defining character trait for so long was his bravado. I was shocked to learn that Shiv is the youngest Roy sibling, not Roman, because Roman feels so young: Kieran Culkin plays him as such a brat, his brashness and nastiness and sex-pestery always performed in the key of a fourteen-year-old boy. That’s there in season four, often in its most evolved, fuck-it, burn-the-world-down form. If nothing matters, why not get the fascist elected?
But Culkin’s truest brilliance – the stuff that’ll be his Emmys b-roll, if the Emmys ever happens again – was in his stunning moments of vulnerability. More than anyone on the show, Logan’s death seems to break him: if Roman’s default state was teenage bravado, his father’s death causes him to retreat into little kid-dom. He’s so shattered by it that it seems like he can’t process or understand what’s going on. At Logan’s funeral, he breaks down, asking to take Logan out of the coffin – as if they might make him alive again. A third, even more delicate thread in Culkin’s performance is Roman’s apparent love for his family members. He’s sincerely interested in starting that dumb business with his siblings, who immediately abandon it to buy a company out from under their dad. Roman loves them in ways that aren’t just vehicles for winning his father’s love or pissing his father off. He even gives a shit about Connor’s wedding. It is, all told, such a complex, nuanced performance, hiding under a brash exterior. Much like Roman himself.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer in Dahmer – “Was Dahmer (sorry, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story) good? Sure, I guess. As Zhou Enlai didn’t really say about the French Revolution, it’s too soon to say. Was Evan Peters good in it? Yes! Despite the show’s title, Peters plays Jeffrey with a vulnerability, a humanity, that makes you almost feel sorry for him – which just makes what he does all the more horrible and horrific.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Luis Gerardo Méndez as Héctor Belascoarán in Belascoarán, PI – “In a year of hidden gems, I weep most for Belascoarán, PI, a fantastic Mexican miniseries about a socialist ‘independent detective’ (not private, because he works for the people, dammit) solving crimes in the midst of Mexico’s Dirty War. Luis Gerardo Méndez plays the titular detective, born in Mexico to Irish and Basque radicals, with effortless bohemian charm and a sincere sense of compassion that radiates off the screen. And the show doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page! It’s a travesty!”
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OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTRESS IN A DRAMA – Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy in Succession
Dean: “Any debate about who should win this award was over the second Kendall yelled that he’s the eldest boy. Shiv’s reaction is a masterclass that should be studied frame by frame in acting schools forever. The single beat of bemused surprise at him raising his voice at all, and then what he said hits and she guffaws so perfectly you feel like you finally understand what makes a guffaw a guffaw. The way her head twists back until it turns her whole body, the contortions of her lips as she tries to suppress five different kinds of laughter at once, the slight turning of her hand as it lifts instinctively toward her chest. Her wheezy, breathless laugh as she leans on her knees. Her voice so high-pitched it’s almost faint when she simply retorts: ‘but you’re not’.
Succession always soared as high as it did because it had the best cast on television, and no one flew higher in its final season than Sarah Snook. Shiv’s unwavering certainty that she’s the smartest person in every room no matter how many times her schemes blow up in her face. The bitter blend of dark and cringe comedy when she tries to give an extremely unnecessary third eulogy at Logan’s funeral, allegedly to give a more human view of her dad, but actually just to call him a misogynist. Her final scene in the back of the car, as she sits hand in unlovable hand with Tom, staring down the barrel of her new role as Wife of an Important Man.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale in Poker Face – “Natasha Lyonne was born for this. Her thick New York accent, husky from years of cigarette smoking, her Jewishness that passes for Italian, her brash, boyish scruffiness, the tenderness under her spikey exterior, her gutsiness, her cleverness, her goddamn pluck. No-one could fill Peter Falk’s shoes as Lt. Columbo, so she does Columbo backwards and in high heels. If I get murdered, call Lyonne to solve the case.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Sharon Horgan as Eva Garvey in Bad Sisters – “Sharon Horgan is always good, but her portrayal of Eva, eldest of the titular Garvey sisters, may be her best work yet. Every sister has motive to kill the Prick, but Eva’s are most complex: among other things, she’s his work rival as well as sister-in-law, and she raised her sisters after their parents died, so she feels an especially heavy responsibility to protect them. A lesser actor might have let the character disappear under all these relationships, but Horgan leads her cast with effortless confidence.”
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OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A DRAMA – Matthew Macfayden as Tom Wambsgans in Succession
Ciara: “Tom Wambsgans! I gave Matthew Macfayden the runner-up for this award last year, so it only seems appropriate for him to win this year. His performance as Tom was, across the show, a masterclass: taking an apparently peripheral character to the centre, again and again, until it seemed only natural that my eyes would be drawn to Shiv’s husband who she has never loved. (Or, or, or…) It was always him, wasn’t it? It’s Wambsgans’s show. The Roys are just living in it.
Tom is at the intersection of two of the show’s most complex, compelling relationships: his relationship to his wife, Shiv, and his relationship to his… assistant, Greg. On paper, both these relationships have the potential to be read as shallow and transactional: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. But Macfayden imbues them with such soul. His love for both these people feels all the more earnest and deep because of the strange shapes his relationships to them take. When it looked like he and Greg were breaking up forever in that one scene in the bathroom, my heart was broken. And it was stitched seamlessly back together when Tom affixed a sticker to Greg’s forehead.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Claes Bang as John Paul Williams in Bad Sisters – “Claes Bang is wonderful in Bad Sisters because he is so evidently hateable, a bastard who is all the more bastardly because he seems so real: he embodies a masculine scariness, ominous and powerful. The way he coils with menace, his ability to put on a charming mask when needed and, when the time comes, tear through it to turn his sharp teeth on his wife and daughter. God, the prick.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Thaneth Warakulnukroh as Governor Narongsak Osottanakorn in Tham Luang Cave: Mission of Hope – “Last year, Netflix released a brilliant Thai docudrama under the incredibly low-rent English title Thai Cave Rescue and no one watched it, or cared. But I watched it, and I cared, and I especially enjoyed Thaneth Warakulnukroh’s performance as the regional governor who defies the central government to mount the titular rescue. His decency and compassion could come off as cartoonishly saintlike in lesser hands, but Warakulnukroh gives him the edge and complexity to be compelling as a human, not just a hero.”
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OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA – Anne-Marie Duff as Grace Williams in Bad Sisters
Dean: “We never really get to see what Grace was like before she married the Prick. Her sisters talk all the time about how she’s withering away under his constant abuse, her personality and sense of self so eroded by years of gaslighting, bullying and mockery she’s barely recognisable anymore. The challenge for Anne-Marie Duff in crafting and performing this character was to make those remarks feel palpably true, to portray entirely in tone and gesture all the negative space Grace used to occupy before the Prick began to erase her from the canvas of her own life. She knocks it out of the park. For as little as we’re told of Grace before the Prick, I feel like I know exactly who she was, and why her sisters are so desperate to bring her back to herself.
Which isn’t to say the Grace we do see is some empty shell. It’s all too easy for a character like this to just be the idea of a battered wife, more of a narrative object for characters – and the audience – to scorn or pity than a character in their own right. But Grace is the heart of the show, and some of my favourite scenes are the private moments of courage and defiance, however temporary, her sisters never see. Her sisters think she’s lost her fight, but she’s fighting the hardest of all. And when she finally wins, it feels like victory over the devil himself.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: J. Smith-Cameron as Gerri Kellman in Succession – “J. Smith-Cameron’s performance as Gerri is resolutely unshowy, but she remained – in season four especially – one of this big, rich, schemey show’s touchpoints of something like being a real person. Smith-Cameron, like Gerri, is a goddamn professional. Even as I long for her to screw her boss’s son, decades her junior.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Karen Fukuhara as Kimiko Miyashiro in The Boys – “After a frankly preposterous four-year wait, I finally got around to watching The Boys this year, and it rules, and I’m an idiot for not watching it sooner. The third season gave its ensemble more opportunities to shine than ever before, and none shone brighter than Karen Fukuhara as the largely mute Kimiko. Whether she was killing a high note in a musical dream sequence or killing a guy with an array of superhero-themed dildos, she consistently stole the show, and my heart.”
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OUTSTANDING WRITING IN A DRAMA – Jesse Armstrong for Succession: “Connor’s Wedding”
Ciara: “Watching ‘Connor’s Wedding’ felt like seeing television history written in real time. This would be an episode to tell your grandkids about. I’ll spoil it, because I have to, but if you’ve somehow managed not to find out what happened on this season of Succession? Fuck off and watch it. Right. Now.
There are many, many incredible choices in the writing of ‘Connor’s Wedding’, not the least of which is that it’s called ‘Connor’s Wedding’. It is, of course, the one where Logan Roy dies. His proximity to the grave was baked into the show’s premise: he had a stroke in the show’s debut episode, for fuck’s sake. And yet, as it plays out in ‘Connor’s Wedding’, it’s shocking. You hear that Logan might be dying, and the earth tilts on its axis. And because we don’t see it happen, it feels unreal. Some mistake. A move, even: 3D chess to the end.
Every performance in ‘Connor’s Wedding’ is spotless, but Armstrong gave them such material to work with: Roman, with his fear that he caused this and his denial that it’s happening; Shiv’s tears; Kendall’s desire to appear unimpeachable. But, in a double reverse card irony, my heart in this episode belongs to Connor: to his unmoved acknowledgement that Logan never loved him, to his going ahead with his wedding to Willa, a handful of guests in attendance. Logan’s death feels like it might kill Roman, Shiv and Kendall. But Connor feels like he might finally be free.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Jesse Armstrong for Succession: “America Decides” – “It might be called ‘America Decides’, but this episode was about how decisions as big as who gets to be president are made in the corridors of power, for all kinds of obscure, petty, self-interested and frequently illegible reasons. Armstrong’s script captures the chaos and harnesses it into a tightly coiled thriller-cum-tragedy.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Augusto Mendoza for Belascoarán, PI: “Days of Combat” – “I honestly could have picked any of Belascoarán, PI’s three episodes, but I chose the first because it’s just so impressive on a craft level. It manages to do a great job introducing and characterising not just the title character, but his entire supporting ensemble of allies and enemies, while telling a compelling murder mystery framed by scenes of Héctor competing on a seventies game show. I was hooked immediately.”
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OUTSTANDING DIRECTING IN A DRAMA – Natasha Lyonne for Poker Face: “The Orpheus Syndrome”
Dean: “The best episode of Poker Face was its tribute to (and collaboration with) legendary special effects and animation genius Phil Tippett, directed by series lead and queen of our hearts Natasha Lyonne. Charlie delivers a bag full of hair from her new salon job to Arthur (Nick Nolte), a crotchety old man living alone in the woods. She discovers he’s a retired special effects artist specialising in monsters and masks, tinkering away on his final film, The Orpheus Syndrome, and offers to become his assistant. Any resemblance to Tippett and his film Mad God is highly intentional, including the reuse of several props and models from that film, though I’m not quite sure how much Cherry Jones as his sociopathic former business partner is meant to remind me of Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy. (She reminds me a lot of Kathleen Kennedy).
The whole episode is beautifully directed, and Lyonne does a particularly good job at creating a sense that, under different circumstances, this house in the woods might have been Charlie’s last stop. Not just a hiding spot, but a home. Her connection with Arthur feels so authentic and heartfelt, you could easily mistake them for a taciturn father and his chatterbox daughter. But in a year with many strong contenders, it’s the final sequence that clinched this award for this episode, as Cherry Jones stumbles her way through a hallucinogenic nightmare world made from the art of everyone she crushed and killed on her way to the top. Simply an epic hour of television.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Mark Mylod for Succession: “Connor’s Wedding” – “‘Connor’s Wedding’ was gobsmacking to watch. It’s one of the best episodes of television ever made. This is not least because of what it chooses not to show: it holds off on showing us Logan’s body for so long, enabling the audience to, like Roman, live in denial.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Andrij Parekh for Succession: “America Decides” – “‘America Decides’ is one of the best episodes of television ever made, and possibly the best episode of Succession. The stakes never higher, the characters never pettier, it makes a cable newsroom calling an election feel like history, tragedy and farce all at once. The fate of a nation turns on inopportune placement of wasabi, and the whole sickening spectacle is somehow just as gut-busting as it is stomach-churning.”
REALITY, VARIETY AND DOCUMENTARY
OUTSTANDING REALITY, VARIETY OR DOCUMENTARY SERIES – The Rehearsal
Dean: “The Rehearsal is a truly singular work of television, at once a natural evolution from Nathan Fielder’s star-making Nathan for You and completely unlike anything I’ve seen, or imagined, before. The premise, on paper, is that Nathan will help people rehearse difficult conversations they plan to have with their loved ones: in the first episode, it’s a guy who let his friends think he had a master’s degree and can’t live with the lie anymore (also, people keep sending him listings for jobs he’s not qualified for). Nathan meticulously recreates the bar where he’ll spill the beans, populates it with extras and casts an actress to play the friend he wants to tell first. If this all sounds a bit over the top, don’t worry: Nathan also steals the actual answers to the bar trivia they’ll be playing that night and spends days contriving scenarios to feed him the answers without his notice.
But that’s just the starting point. Over the course of six episodes, he hires a fleet of child actors to play the son of a woman contemplating motherhood, breaks into and lives in the home of an acting student at his school for rehearsal extras, and moves the fake bar he built in episode one across the country so he can run it as a real venture (albeit just for the company). Nathan has long made an art out of escalating comedic premises far past the line of good taste, but in The Rehearsal, he goes on a genuine psychological odyssey, contemplating who he is and what he does until, in its final moments, he finally realises the whole show is immoral, and he should never have made it.
I can’t wait for season two!”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Kids – “Kids is a documentary series about young people leaving care, mostly because they’ve turned eighteen. It is at once a glimpse into a societal periphery generally ignored and neglected, and a collection of universal coming of age stories. In particular, in this age of hysteria, it was so moving to see a young woman finally find a family in the drag community.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: I Think You Should Leave – “It’s a testament to I Think You Should Leave that it’s still never had a sketch worse than ‘meh’ even after Fred Armisen showed up in full comedy vacuum mode to suck every laugh out of his. It’s still so clearly the best sketch show ever made that praising it almost feels redundant. Just thinking about the Driving Crooner brings tears of laughter to my eyes, and I’m pretty sure the ‘pig’ from the Darmine Doggy Door will haunt my sleep paralysis nightmares forever. May it reign a hundred years.”
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OUTSTANDING REALITY, VARIETY OR DOCUMENTARY SPECIAL – John Mulaney: Baby J
Ciara: “I’ve always liked John Mulaney, but he had a nicecore aesthetic that I found… not off-putting, but which I associate with the past, with Parks and Recreation and an innocent belief in the possibility of liberalism to improve society somewhat. It’s a posture that feels just a little too sunny in a post-Trump, post-pandemic, post-post word. This isn’t even really to do with Mulaney; it’s to do with the web of associations my brain has built up over the years. But Baby J, his first special since going to rehab, feels like a shell has cracked open. It’s a deconstruction of his own persona that retains the core of his comic style. It’s the funniest he’s ever been, but also the most cohesive, but also the most daring. Watching it felt like remembering why I love stand-up comedy.
‘I can honestly say, what is someone going to do to me that is worse than I’m going to do to myself?’ Mulaney asks, ‘What, are you going to cancel John Mulaney? I’ll kill him. I almost did!’
Part of what makes Baby J so great is that it’s not just a series of discrete bits; it’s a story about Mulaney’s addictions, interventions, sobriety, and, eventually, fatherhood, told in a propulsive, kinetic style. But also, I could list my favourite bits for days. The nurse who thinks he’s talking to Al Pacino on the phone! That no-one in rehab knows who he is! Complaining about the people who attended his intervention over Zoom! The whole running bit with the preteen in the audience! Masterful stuff. Here’s to many more.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Stewart Lee: Tornado – “Stewart Lee released two specials this year, Snowflake and Tornado. Snowflake is really good – he, and I mean this as literally as possible, says the unsayable – but it’s a little bit greatest hits. Tornado is fresh and crisp, a reminder, should you need it, that he is the greatest living stand-up on earth. It’s a belligerent, byzantine set that features observational comedy about drowning your intrusive thoughts with alcohol and a whole bit about seducing a woman with two rotisserie chickens. Erving Goffman woulda loved it.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: South Park: The 25th Anniversary Concert – “No one was more surprised than me when I started earnestly crying at a South Park concert. But what else can you possibly do when the surviving members of Rush reunite to perform for the first time since Neil Peart’s death, with Matt Stone taking his place on drums? Other highlights include Mr. Slave’s voice actor showing up in coat and tails to say ‘Jesus Christ’ during the ‘The Ballad of Lemmiwinks’ and a history of the theme song that ends with Les Claypool yelling ‘AIN’T NOTHIN’ BETTER THAN A BIT O’ WHAMOLA’.”
COMEDY
OUTSTANDING COMEDY SERIES – Party Down
Ciara: “Party Down’s belated third season was the Twin Peaks: The Return of sitcoms. A once-great show returns so many years later and is not alone still great, but better than ever.
Where so many sitcoms feel like their characters have settled into this situation for years to come, Party Down always felt transitional, contingent, fleeting: a bunch of aspiring actors and writers working for a catering company to pay their rent, and, in the case of our lead Henry (Adam Scott), trying to live down his one brush with success – a commercial in which he says the catchphrase ‘Are we having fun yet?!’ In season three, the former Party Down staff are scattered to the wind: some of them are ‘successful’, some of them are not. Some of them are still working at Party Down, and some of them end up back working at Party Down as a second job to make ends meet.
Party Down season three succeeds where so many reboots fail because it understands these characters had lives when they were off our screens. It doesn’t let us skate by on our assumptions, that this tiny window we saw for two seasons was the most important thing to ever happen. ‘Why root for them?’ a character asks about the original series’ will-they-won’t-they couple, ‘Why not root against them?’ It is also, and I can’t overstate this, very funny. I have attempted to explain the plot of ‘KSGY-95 Prizewinner’s Luau’ to far too many people. They nodded along politely, but if they watched it, they’d get it.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: The Other Two – “After a disappointing second season, The Other Two didn’t just return to form with season three, it blew its (excellent!) first season out of the water. When I was watching it, I kept recording clips on my phone to send to my friends with no context. It has what I’m pretty sure is the best joke yet written about January 6th. It has a musical sequence about gay guys going back to their home towns to ‘win’ their high school reunion. It has a whole thing where Molly Shannon dates Simu Liu and he’s really bad at eating pussy! Art.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Ramy – “I waited over two years for Ramy’s third season to come out, then almost a year more to watch it because I was so afraid it would suck and break my heart. It didn’t, and it didn’t. It was one of my favourite seasons of television ever. In these jaded latter days of the star-driven sadcom, Ramy was more thrilling, inventive and hilarious than ever, less an emotional rollercoaster than a whole emotional amusement park. I will think about it forever.”
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OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR IN A COMEDY – Bill Hader as Barry Berkman in Barry
Ciara: “Bill Hader’s performance as Barry, like Bryan Cranston’s as Walter White in Breaking Bad, feels like a descent that’s really a slow reveal of who they were all along. We know from the beginning the evil things Barry has done, and in our naivety, feel sorry for him: he was used, first by the American military, then by a family friend, as a killing machine. You assume his soul has been punctured. You assume he has a soul.
By the end, Barry seems like an evil man. A deeply selfish person whose only real qualm is how his actions may affect the story he tells himself about himself: that he’s a good man. Taking out bad guys, or being victimised by them. That, sure, he’s done bad things, but so did Abraham Lincoln. So maybe he can still be the hero of this story. That is ultimately the only thing about killing that has disturbed him – that it muddies the narrative. Or rather, it clarifies the narrative into a nice, clean line, but one that runs in the wrong direction.
Bill Hader is an unwavering constant. But it doesn’t feel that way. He tricks us, again and again, into imagining there might be more there than there is. Because Barry might not be a good actor in class or on stage, but he’s a great actor. His whole life is an act. A performance of humanity by a man who has none.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Matt Berry as Laszlo Cravensworth in What We Do in the Shadows – “It’s Matt Berry. What more do you need to know?”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Adam Scott as Henry Pollard in Party Down – “No one in Party Down has matured and changed more since its original run than Henry, so it’s all the more impressive how effortlessly Adam Scott makes the gap between his performances seem seamless. He’s not just the kind of guy Henry would end up as in middle age, he’s exactly who Henry would end up as. His same sense of humour, but his cynicism softened by years of stable living. And he’s particularly excellent at flirting and falling in love with Jennifer Garner.”
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OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTRESS IN A COMEDY – Natasia Demetriou as Nadja of Antipaxos in What We Do in the Shadows
Dean: “What We Do in the Shadows is still great (as of the fourth season, anyway, I haven’t watched the fifth yet), but its fourth season might have had just a bit too much going on. It could get a bit frantic and muddled at times, and probably would have benefited from pruning at least one of its season-long storylines. Given that power, the absolute last thing I would change is Nadja’s plan to turn the local headquarters of the Vampiric Council into a vampire nightclub (with blood sprinklers! like Blade!), not least because it finally gave Natasia Demetriou a well-deserved chance to go sicko mode and eat the rest of the cast alive.
Nadja has always had an ambitious streak that Nandor and Laszlo lack, possibly because they already had their share of wealth and power in life, while she was born dirt poor in a village Nandor burnt to the ground. Now that she finally has some real power, she’s more of a tyrant than Nandor was, steamrolling over the Guide with her renovation plans, and apoplectic when the wraiths unionise and she’s forced to the negotiating table. Demetriou doesn’t just chew the scenery, she devours it whole, but she’s never funnier than when Nadja has to pretend to be Guillermo’s human girlfriend at dinner with his family… who all share his genetic vampire hunter abilities.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Quinta Brunson as Janine Teagues in Abbott Elementary – “Abbott Elementary would be nothing without Quinta Brunson’s radiant performance in the lead, an idealistic and naïve second-grade teacher in a predominantly black working-class school. She’s a Leslie Knope for the Biden era, and like Amy Poehler’s performance as Leslie, she allows her character to be both the butt of the joke and a shining ray of hope.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Dominique Fishback as Andrea “Dre” Greene in Swarm – “Barry wasn’t the only show this year that dared to ask: how dark you can make a comedy before it stops being a comedy? The answer is: as long as I keep laughing. Swarm was one of the darkest, saddest things I’ve laughed out loud at in a while, and no one deserves more credit for that than Dominique Fishback. She plays the shy, withholding and frequently nonverbal Dre so expressively at every register from paralysed to psychotic I could almost feel the storm inside her billowing around me”
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OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A COMEDY – Henry Winkler as Gene Cousineau in Barry
Dean: “The third season of Barry ended with the suggestion that, for once in his life, Gene Cousineau had done something good out of a genuine sense of moral responsibility instead of pure self-interest. BZZZT. Wrong! Gene Cousineau is a greedy little fame junkie who’ll do anything for a hit, even when it doesn’t benefit him, and only an actor as great as Henry Winkler could even temporarily convince me otherwise. Of course he rang a Vanity Fair reporter right after Barry was arrested. Of course he kept his appointment with that reporter even after he was repeatedly warned it could jeopardise the case against Barry. Gene is incorrigible. It’s shocking, if not especially surprising, when the reporter shows up for the interview and Gene performs a self-aggrandising one-man show loosely based on the events of the previous seasons at him instead.
So it’s all the more impressive that, after the time skip, Winkler sells the possibility of his redemption even more convincingly. Gene returns to Hollywood after spending years in hiding in Israel, and when he says he’s there to stop Warner Bros making a film about Barry because he thinks it’s immoral and exploitative, it sets off the auld bullshit alarm fairly lively. But he’s stern, he’s steadfast, and he seems sincere. You begin to wonder if the years have changed him. BZZZT. They haven’t. His ultimate fate is one of the more darkly ironic in the final season: remembered forever, not as an actor, or even as an attention-seeking idiot, but as a ruthless, manipulative drug lord. If only Henry Winkler had played him in the movie.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Stephen Root as Monroe Fuches in Barry – “The Raven himself. Stephen Root was great throughout Barry, but in the final season, there’s a scene where he watches Rain Man and decides that’s just like him and Barry, and it’s one of the funniest things I saw this year. Also, he’s the most terrifying man in screen history, or whatever.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Anthony Carrigan as NoHo Hank in Barry – “It has been the pleasure of my life to watch Anthony Carrigan go from overqualified villain-of-the-week actor on superhero shows to one of the most acclaimed comedic and dramatic performers on television. His performance as Hank was a revelation to the end. From the dizzying heights of true love to the crushing despair of getting everything you ever wanted and every twist of envy and cowardice between, Carrigan stayed the most electric thing on screen. We may never see its like again.”
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OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY – Sarah Goldberg as Sally Reed in Barry
Ciara: “There is a moment in the final season of Barry where Sally decides to teach an acting class. (She can’t get work as an actor since he was exposed online as ‘entitled cunt girl’, and those who can’t do, etc.) In a close-up, she gives out to one of her students for being shallow and vain, nothing more than a ‘perfect pair of tits.’ It’s an incredible moment: shocking, visceral, uncomfortable. Goldberg unloads full-force. It’s a revelation about how cycles of abuse perpetuate – this is the same technique through which Sally learned to act, after all – and a revelation about Sally’s character. Or, at the very least, a confirmation of what we should have noticed all along. When I reach for comparisons, it’s to the character reveal in Rhea Seehorn’s three-time Sundae Award-winning performance as Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul.
Goldberg creates a performance inside her performance as Emily, Sally’s on-the-run alter ego: a hard-drinking waitress with a southern accent, who longs to be anywhere but here. Her indifference to her son is a brave acting choice that plays as comedy and tragedy at once. But more than anything, and more than ever, Goldberg radiates anxious desperation: desperate to do, desperate to be. Anything, anyone, anywhere, other than this. Her performance-within-a-performance as Emily is so spot on, yet you never trick yourself into imagining she’s in control. The hard drinking isn’t just a character choice.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Jennifer Garner as Evie Adler in Party Down – “When I found out Jennifer Garner was in the Party Down reboot, I figured the show would suck. Stunt cast a proper famous person when you couldn’t get your original female lead (Lizzy Caplan) back. But guess what! The third season of Party Down ruled, and Garner ruled maybe most of all. She plays a film producer who flirts with Henry (Adam Scott) and, of all things, encourages him to get back into acting. And she’s kind of the heart of the show.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Ally Sheedy as Carol Fink in Single Drunk Female – “It is objectively funny that Ally Sheedy from The Breakfast Club turned out to be so great at playing shitty mothers in her later years, and she was never greater, or funnier, than as Carol Fink. Carol is neurotic, pig-headed, demanding, and not infrequently cruel, and I love how Sheedy milked her discomfort at being nice to anyone ever for constant laughs during her tentative steps toward redemption. Fuck Disney for not only cancelling this show, but pulling it from streaming.”
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OUTSTANDING WRITING IN A COMEDY – Dayo Adesokan for Party Down: “KSGY-95 Prizewinner’s Luau”
Dean: “If the third season of Party Down is the Twin Peaks: The Return of sitcoms – and it is – then ‘KSGY-95 Prizewinner’s Luau’ is its ‘The Return, Part 8’: a rare opportunity to cut loose and show you just how powerful it really is. The crew are catering a pre-show luau for a crowd of middle-aged men who’ve all won tickets to see Sting. Ron says the watchword for the day is ‘chill’, so when Evie brings way too much shrooms to trip with Henry, they share. First-time user Sackson livestreams himself tripping on big fistfuls of caps (‘Can you imagine the numbers if my psyche cleaves in twain live?’), overqualified chef Lucy starts making conceptual food art instead of hot dogs (‘It has the quality of food, but no nutritional value!’), and Roman gets super paranoid about a guy in a windbreaker… then gets dragged into a tent.
Turns out the luau is actually a STING operation by THE POLICE, all the ‘winners’ are dads delinquent on child support and alimony, and their bus is taking them to jail, not a gig. The cops ask Roman to help identify a particular deadbeat, mistaking his paranoia for perceptiveness. The drug stuff alone would make this the funniest episode of television I’ve seen in some time, but once the goofy cops are in the mix, it hits another level. The smug pride of the guy who thought of the Sting pun vs Bobby Moynihan indignantly insisting ‘there’s a new generation of deadbeats with no connection to Sting’ and they need to start using Matchbox Twenty and Blink-182 tickets. The fact it also advances every character’s arc for the season is just gravy.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Bill Hader for Barry: “yikes” – “Barry is one of the best shows of all time, and went out on a high. Right from ‘yikes’, the season premiere, its eyes are clear: blackly comic, bleakly sad, morally complex without losing moral clarity. Also, it has a gag where Sally’s bedroom in her parents’ home has been converted into her dad’s man cave. Classic.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Adel Kamal & Rammy Youssef for Ramy: “Merchants in Medina” – “I didn’t think Ramy would ever do another episode as funny as ‘Second Opinion Doctor’, and then the very next episode was ‘Merchants in Medina’. I will go to my grave laughing at lines like ‘the Qur’an is the original blockchain’, ‘give a big New Jersey hello to the Halal Brothers’ and ‘the only water straight out of Mecca, with added electrolytes’. And that’s just the cold open!”
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OUTSTANDING DIRECTING IN A COMEDY – Bill Hader for Barry: “tricky legacies”
Ciara: “As Barry drew to a close this year, a myth developed: that it was no longer a comedy. That it had gotten so unrelentingly dark that funny-haha got thrown out with the bathwater. And God, it got unrelentingly dark – befitting a show about a serial killer – but it never, ever stopped being funny. Even this episode’s title is funny. The way Barry (Bill Hader) says ‘tricky legacies’ after listing off the misdeeds of Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi? Gold.
‘tricky legacies’ is the first episode after an eight-year time skip. Like the future sequences in Better Call Saul, it sees our on-the-run protagonist living an approximation of a normal life: being a perfectly regular guy out in some anonymous little town, indistinguishable from all the other perfectly regular guys except that it’s all a lie. Hader shoots Lancaster, California like it’s the middle of nowhere, in stark relief from the show’s urban norm.
Unlike Jimmy McGill, Barry has his girl and their son – and that makes it all so much worse, because unlike Jimmy McGill, Barry is a sociopath. His legacy is not ‘tricky.’ It’s cold blood and bullets. It’s murder. This is, of course, what Barry was always about. But also, Sally wearing a brunette wig for eight years instead of dyeing her hair is one of the most perfectly executed gags in a moment of tense drama ever. And that’s what Barry was always about, too.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Sarah Schneider for The Other Two: “Brooke Gets Her Hands Dirty” – “This year, The Other Two gave us a Pleasantville episode about procedurals, which is such Ciara Moloney pandering that it would be dishonest not to honour it. Cary gets a couple-of-episodes role on Emily Overruled, a network legal procedural that’s been running forever. The set of Emily Overruled is a black-and-white world that begins to turn to colour when Cary spreads the dangerous idea that they don’t have to say the lines exactly as written; that they can improvise and be creative. The use of colour alone makes it worthy runner-up material. At least!”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Joe Pelling, Becky Sloan & Baker Terry for Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared: “Electricity” – “I put off watching Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared for a long time because I was so sure it could only lose something in the transition from YouTube to television. Don’t make the same mistake I did. It’s the surreal, fucked-up comedy-horror edutainment puppet show of my nightmares, and culminated in one of the most hilarious, heartbreaking, horrifying episodes of television this year, when Yellow Guy notices their house has had an upstairs this entire time.”
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