Centuries from now, a visitor from another world may find this post among the detritus of data within a hard drive excavated from the ruined wasteland left behind by our once-dominant species. Maybe it won’t be space aliens, but whatever terrestrial species next evolves the mix of sapience, wanderlust and grip strength that allowed us to conquer the globe. Maybe it’ll even be distant humans, reconstructing the history lost in the fall.
If so, we hope that this – the tenth (!!!) annual Sundae TV Awards – can stand as a testament to a very human fact: that as humanity slipped deeper and deeper into the ever-widening gyre of the torment nexus, deranging ourselves and destroying each other, we also produced and watched a lot of damn good television.
These, as far as we’re concerned, are the best shows of the most recent TV season (June 2025 – May 2026). 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.
DRAMA
OUTSTANDING DRAMA SERIES – The Pitt
Dean: “For a few glorious weeks earlier this year, I had three medical shows airing new seasons at the same time: the revival of Scrubs and the second seasons of St. Denis Medical and The Pitt. But the greatest of these is The Pitt, the best and most thoroughly televisual show on television right now. It’s as good an episodic show as a serial, as impressive a technical achievement as a creative one, emotionally rich, thematically resonant and a showcase for the best ensemble working today.
Whereas the first season’s mass shooting suddenly drove the drama into a fever pitch, its second-season catastrophe – a shutdown of computer systems across multiple Philadelphia hospitals due to cyberattacks – unfolds as a slow grinding on the characters, building across the season and heightening the tension in every situation.
One of its best qualities is its willingness to raise social issues and moral questions with uncommon grace, threading the needle of having a strong viewpoint while representing many within it. Mel’s conflict with her sister Becca, al-Hashimi’s AI advocacy, Whitaker’s ambiguous relationship with a former patient’s widow, it’s all allowed to breathe and play out over multiple episodes. Admirable characters get to be wrong, awful characters get to be right. Most importantly of all, it lets that which is uncomfortably irreconcilable simply be painful, ugly and uninspiring, giving us no more comfort with the characters’ choices than it gives the characters. I hope it never ends.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Pluribus – “There is much to admire in Pluribus – at a base level, it offers an interesting twist on the typical pod people narrative by having most of the survivors uninterested in ‘saving the world’ – but it would deserve my runner-up purely for providing a showcase for the inimitable Rhea Seehorn.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Slow Horses – “Slow Horses bounced back from a sometimes-wobbly fourth season with its best yet, a back-to-basics race against the clock as the Horses scramble to unravel two intertwined mysteries: (1) who’s trying to collapse the British state? and (2) why would a smart, beautiful woman willingly date Roddy Ho?”
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OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR IN A DRAMA – John Cena as Christopher Smith / Peacemaker in Peacemaker
Ciara: “The first season of Peacemaker saw Chris struggling out from the influence of his abusive, white supremacist father and making fledgling attempts to deal with his boatload of trauma. In the second season, Chris is no longer a total asshole, but he is incredibly sad, what with his family being dead and his found family pulling apart at the seams. So when he stumbles into an alternate universe where his dad is loving, his brother is alive, and the three of them are beloved superheroes, it seems like an escape to paradise.
It is not an escape to paradise. It turns out to be an opportunity to relive the worst things that ever happened to him in exciting new ways. Chris has carried around the guilt of accidentally killing his brother for decades. So when he sees his friends attacking his brother – a full grown man, which he never lived to be in their universe – he screams out a ‘stop’ anguished enough to be barely discernible as words. He can’t see this happen again. He’s doomed to see this happen again. And John Cena, who is such a natural in comedy and action that it seems like asking too much to pull off tragedy, too, brings deeper emotion to it than you could fathom. You can hear his heart breaking.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch in The Pitt – “I hope Noah Wyle spends a whole season hanging on by a thread only to have an emotional
breakthrough at the end every year for the rest of my life. The best show on TV, and he’s the heart and soul of it.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Nicolas Cage as Ben Reilly / The Spider in Spider-Noir – “Nicolas Cage doing Cagney and Bogart impressions for eight hours would be wonderful enough, but it’s all the more wonderful that it is in service of a performance this rich and complex. Cage wasn’t joking when he said Reilly is ‘a spider cosplaying as a human’ and he plays that fact for comedy and tragedy, horror and slapstick, pathos and wit.”
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OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTRESS IN A DRAMA – Rhea Seehorn as Carol Sturka in Pluribus
Dean: “When Rhea Seehorn won the Emmy for Pluribus this year, it was in part an apology for the years they snubbed her as Kim Wexler on Better Call Saul. Not here. This is her fourth Sundae, tying her with former co-star Bob Odenkirk for most wins by any person in any category, and putting her in pole position to overtake him. Only right and proper for the best fucking actor on television.
I can’t remember the last time a TV protagonist arrived as fully-formed and well-realised as Carol Sturka, one of a handful of people to survive a pod person apocalypse. Where Kim Wexler was buttoned-up and repressed, Carol is brazen and outspoken, yet no less emotionally closed off: everything she expresses is sincere, but it’s also the kind of honesty you perform because if you always tell people what you think, they’ll never wonder what you feel. She’s cynical but principled, stubborn but fickle, an egotist with no self-respect and even less respect for others, the only person who can save a world that doesn’t want to be saved.
Pluribus, by design, requires a single performer of such talent and skill they can carry a series on their back, and Seehorn more than rises to the task, with depth and range the envy of any actor. But she’s also a brilliant scene partner to her co-stars, whether with individual actors like Karolina Wydra and Samba Schutte or the collective ensemble of the hive mind. I’ll wait as long as I must for more.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Kaitlin Olson as Morgan Guillory in High Potential – “I’m just glad Kaitlin Olson is finally getting her flowers. She deserves all her flowers. This show is just okay, but she’s wonderful in it.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Linda Cardellini as Carol Love-Smernitch in DTF St. Louis – “DTF St. Louis is a strange show whose flavours I’m still turning over in my head months later. Do I actually like it? I’m not sure. But I certainly admire it, and I admire nothing more than Linda Cardellini’s barnstorming lead performance. Her simultaneous adoration of and revulsion towards her husband is extraordinary to behold.”
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OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A DRAMA – Stephen Root as Wyck Crawford in Widow’s Bay
Dean: “Stephen Root is one of our great living character actors, a successful, respected and acclaimed performer who would be more than entitled to rest on his laurels and coast on goodwill for the rest of his career. Instead, he remains both excellent and prolific, one of the hardest-working men in Hollywood. He was in the main cast of three shows this year alone – including a wonderful turn as Glem in the already-cancelled future cult classic Strip Law – but his role as Wyck in Widow’s Bay has rightly earned him the most plaudits.
If Widow’s Bay is kind of Jaws, and Tom is both Mayor and Brody, then Wyck is his Quint, the oddball old-timer warning of doom and death if people don’t listen to him. Like Quint, Wyck’s eccentricity is well-earned: the man has seen some shit. But instead of nearly dying on the Indianapolis, Wyck’s traumatic backstory is just being from Widow’s Bay and living with the horrors of its curse.
He’s introduced as someone who could easily be a recurring gag character, howling about men getting taken by the fog, but he emerges as the show’s bearer of truths both sacred and profane, with the hardened wisdom of someone who has made unforgivable choices and knows he will again. Stephen Root brings the depth of tragedy, anger and pain long ago curdled in Wyck’s heart to the fore episode by episode while continuing to remain one of the funniest people on a very funny show.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Patrick Ball as Dr. Frank Langdon in The Pitt – “Langdon’s return to medicine after his drug addiction was exposed in season one would have been easy to play as a kind of villainous turn or as mushy redemption narrative. Ball skilfully avoids both, portraying Langdon’s efforts to make amends as sincere but never saintly.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Nick Offerman as Chester A. Arthur in Death by Lightning – “Nick Offerman gives by far the best performance in Death by Lightning as the boorish, boozy, bull-headed ‘next Vice President of you cocksuckers’, Chester A. Arthur. He does his best work in Arthur’s growing bafflement and rage that James Garfield continues to put his faith in him even as Arthur is openly betraying him, and his gradually-then-all-at-once vindication of that faith when he finally turns on the scheming Roscoe Conkling.”
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OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA – Kate O’Flynn as Patricia Moyer in Widow’s Bay
Ciara: “Kate O’Flynn reinvents the idea of the grown-up Final Girl on screen. Often, returns to the girl who survives a slasher movie follow the Sarah Connor model and depict her as becoming both tough and paranoid, a kind of doomsday prepper about one guy instead of the end of the world. Patricia is the Laurie Strode of Widow’s Bay, the lone survivor of a spree killing of teenage girls when she was a high schooler. But she is a totally different kind of social outcast than Jamie Lee Curtis fortifying her home in Halloween (2018). As far as everyone in town is concerned, she made up that the murderer came after her for attention, taking a tragedy and trying to make it about herself.
O’Flynn plays Patricia with a mixture of guilelessness, desperation for approval, and willingness to fly off the handle that allows you to believe she really was traumatised by those events and understand why everyone thinks she’s a delusional whackjob. There are shades of Kristen Wiig in Welcome to Me, Sissy Spacek in Carrie, and Alison Brie in Horse Girl. Yet even as O’Flynn gives a performance meaty enough for a lead, she is more than willing to help her co-stars shine: delivering weird, funny lines in meetings that are mostly about what’s going on with Matthew Rhys’s character, as good as a joke delivery system as she is as a whole person.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Jennifer Holland as Emilia Harcourt in Peacemaker – “In her first appearance in season two, Emilia Harcourt is diagnosed with a classic case of toxic masculinity. It’s true that Harcourt is the kind of role not frequently written for diminutive blonde women like Holland: she gets into bar fights just to feel something. Yet Holland embodies the role so naturally that it’s a big surprise to see her as a feminine Emilia of the alternate earth. (Naturally, she pulls that off, too.)”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Fiona Dourif as Dr. Cassie McKay in The Pitt – “McKay is more confident and assured in The Pitt’s second season, and so is Fiona Dourif. With most of the more senior staff spinning out mid-shift due to various personal crises, McKay quietly emerges as the backbone of the E.D., never more clearly than when she calls out Robby’s obvious death wish with a clarity he can barely withstand in the moment.”
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OUTSTANDING WRITING IN A DRAMA – Jenn Carroll for Pluribus: “The Gap”
Dean: “Pluribus is already one of the best-written shows on the decade, and we could have picked almost any episode for this award. But we chose ‘The Gap’ because its lean, powerful script is the best testament to how great the show is even when the camera stops looking at Rhea Seehorn for almost twenty whole minutes.
There is remarkably little dialogue in “The Gap” and much of what’s there is repeated, from the message on the Others’ answering machine to Manousos’ mantra-like intonation of his planned greeting to Carol. (“My name is Manousos Oviedo. I am not one of them. I wish to save the world.”) Yet it manages monumental character work within that constraint and gives the show three of its very best sequences.
First, Carol driving around Albuquerque singing, in turn, ‘I’m Alright’ by Kenny Loggins (on the golf course), ‘Born to Be Wild’ (after stealing a fancy car), ‘Hot in Herre’ (in a country club hot tub) and ‘Georgia on My Mind’ (at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum). Hilarious. Second, Manousos’ attempted crossing of the Darien Gap, one of the most hostile environments on Earth. Harrowing. Finally, Carol’s staredown with the firework, and her desperate plea for the Others to return. Heartbreaking.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Jacob Tierney for Heated Rivalry: “Hunter” – “Heated Rivalry is, in many ways, a bunch of fanfiction tropes in a trench coat, and this standalone episode about Scott Hunter falling for a guy at the smoothie shop is the most of all. But Jacob Tierney, as Pauline Kael wrote about Robert Altman, turns fake magic into magic. ‘Hunter’ is a miniature romcom that made my heart sing.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Sean Gray for Slow Horses: “Tall Tales” – “This is my kind of episode. Slough House is put under lockdown by MI5 due to a security breach, so the Horses have to break out of their own office to stop a rapidly unfolding terrorist plot. The masterful centrepiece of the episode – of the whole season, really – is Jackson’s haunting monologue about the torture of a British agent by the Stasi in the final days of the Cold War.”
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OUTSTANDING DIRECTING IN A DRAMA – Noah Wyle for The Pitt: “12:00 PM”
Ciara: “The Pitt is no stranger to death, but there are some patients you don’t expect to die. Chronic alcoholic Louie seemed like a character destined to recur forever, so his death is devastating. All the more so because ’12:00 PM’ maintains the show’s realist bent: there is no slow-mo, no sad music cue. His death is shot like the death of people whose names we never learned. There is nothing cold or distant in this approach. It’s just that every death is as sad as Louie’s to somebody. There is, for most of this episode, no time to take a breath, as work in the emergency department continues its breakneck pace. Patients we get to know – the felon transferred from the prison, or a mother with cancer – and patients we see only briefly – a guy who gets sick after winning a hotdog eating contest – all need to be treated, and wait for no man.
’12:00 PM’ has two peaks. First is the scene in which charge nurse Dana cleans Louie’s body and prepares him for viewing, which feels all the more like an act of profound care because of how direct and no-nonsense she is. She uses it as an opportunity to teach Emma, a young nurse, how to do the work. Second is the viewing, described as a clinical ‘debrief’ by the staff but shot like a family at a loved one’s deathbed. It makes sense: the staff are the closest thing to family he had. Dana had explained that they leave one arm outside the sheet so that family can hold the dead person’s hand. Emma does exactly that.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Jacob Tierney for Heated Rivalry: “Rose” – “Surely when the Lumière brothers invented the motion camera, they hoped that one day Jacob Tierney would shoot two men staring at each other with homoerotic longing in a nightclub lit in a magenta that would make Tony Montana blush with ‘All the Things She Said’ by t.A.T.u. playing over it.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Hwang Dong-hyuk for Squid Game: “The Starry Night” – “Neither of Squid Game’s genuinely great later seasons quite reach the highest highs of its first, except here. The game is hide and seek, and on that simple frame hangs its most tense, gutwrenching, heartbreaking hour since ‘Gganbu’. Beautiful and crushing.”
REALITY, VARIETY AND DOCUMENTARY
OUTSTANDING REALITY, VARIETY OR DOCUMENTARY SERIES – The Traitors Ireland
Dean: “I never thought The Traitors Ireland would be good because, quite frankly, Ireland has never produced a good reality competition show before and I assumed this would just be the latest in a long line of disappointments, all the more disappointing because The Traitors is such a good format. I love Siobhán McSweeney, but found her sort of a strange choice for a host on announcement. It airs on RTÉ, the national home of mediocre television.
How wonderful then that the first season of The Traitors Ireland turned out to be one of the best in a franchise that’s taken the world by storm. Siobhán McSweeney is a perfect host, and the fields and forests of north Leinster provide a fine bucolic setting. But it’s the contestants and their conflicts who really make the show. The Traitor-on-Traitor fights at the roundtable, the high drama of the “mean girls” speech, whatever gibberish was coming out of Wilkin’s mouth at any given moment.
But it should go without saying that no one made the show like Paudie Moloney, the platonic ideal of an Irish dad, with his resting ‘about to tell you what’s wrong with your car’ face and a dry quip for every situation. The fact he and his son didn’t tell each other they were doing the show (‘Why? Because we’re both liars,’ says Paudie) is just the beginning of one of the most iconic performances in Irish television history. We don’t call him the Paudfather for nothing.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: The Yogurt Shop Murders – “This would already be a brilliant docuseries for how it balances all the varied ways this crime reverberated through different lives for decades: the families of the girls who were murdered, the boys who were coerced into false confessions and their families, the cops haunted by the irresolution and the ones who lie and bully and convince themselves they were right all along. But then the final episode happens!”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model – “Reality Check is a pretty boilerplate Netflix docuseries, yet it is precisely that apparent banality that seems to have lured Tyra Banks into incriminating herself at length on camera in some of the most jaw-droppingly unselfaware shit I have ever seen from a celebrity. An essential insight into the world of reality TV.”
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OUTSTANDING REALITY, VARIETY OR DOCUMENTARY SPECIAL – Marc Maron: Panicked
Ciara: “Two common strains in contemporary stand-up comedy are 1. Guy says a bunch of controversial shit, often about trans people for some reason, and says he’s being cancelled or silenced for it despite literally saying this in a Netflix special, 2. The sad, trauma-driven set, probably best exemplified by Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. I like a lot of stuff in category 2, but a part of me longs for the kind of no-holes-barred shock humour that category 1 promises and fails to deliver. Plenty of my favourite recent stand-up eschews both strains, but in Panicked, Marc Maron combines the highest possible virtues of both while elegantly avoiding all their pitfalls. It is the beautiful precision of clockwork, but for yowling about American fascism and grieving your late partner (the great Lynn Shelton).
But I give Maron this award for a particular virtuoso section in the special’s second half, when he talks about his experience of childhood sexual abuse from a babysitter, including discussing it as an adult with his father who is in the early stages of dementia. ‘His father was a sergeant,’ Maron’s dad says, whatever that means. It is, in an objective sense, horrible and sad. Maron forewarns the audience that it will be hard to listen to. And yet: it is so funny, so outrageous, so diligently sustains a comedic register, that I could probably rewatch it every day and laugh every time. It might not go down smooth, but it tastes good all the same.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not – “Marina Zenovich’s excellent documentary reveals Chevy Chase as a shockingly interesting person. Near the start, he states that he’s a complex fucking guy, and it’s true: the world has chosen to remember Chevy as an asshole, and he is, but also a genius, a victim, an aggressor, all at the same time. Zenovich paints each facet painted as vividly as the next.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Robby Hoffman: Wake Up – “It’s been a while since I’ve seen a comedian be this confidently provocative without patting themselves on the back and/or portraying themselves as persecuted because their shock humour shocked people. Hoffman calls herself ‘the reverse Ellen’ – a monster in public, but a ‘fucking delight’ in private – and she bares her fangs proudly in a very funny special that hits hardest when she jokes about the kind of poverty she grew up in: ‘whatever fucking towels you’re born with is the fucking towels you die with’.”
COMEDY
OUTSTANDING COMEDY SERIES – Hacks
Ciara: “Hacks was the best show on television. Much like our drama winner, The Pitt, Hacks emphatically built upon TV tradition – there is an episode literally set at the Paley Center for Media – while being unmistakably modern. It’s a show that understood stand-up, that understood sitcoms, that understood late night, in ways that most narratives set around those worlds seek to flatten and simplify. And it used the breadth of that understanding not for shallow pastiche, but to craft a vision of the history and future of women in American comedy. Right at the centre of that vision, it created two of the most indelible, hilarious female characters on TV.
The relationship between Deborah and Ava continued, five seasons in, to reveal new complexities, new depths. The finale would, in worse hands, seem a little out of nowhere, all payoff and no set-up. Instead, ‘Hacks’ is as perfectly pitched a finale as this decade has seen, more than justifying using the series title for the episode title.
Bonus round: There is a gay heist for the jumpsuit Carol Burnett wore on her last episode of The Carol Burnett Show. Ava dates a sex worker who is also a magician and is really judgmental about one of those two jobs. Deborah and DJ go on The Amazing Race. I could list shit all day. The Fatty Arbuckle biopic? Amazing.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – “In its seventeenth season, It’s Always Sunny has become a sitcom haunted by age and death, both in its fictional world and in reality. The Gang still insists that they are young, despite all evidence to the contrary, but they’ve never been good at facing reality. This is part of the context that makes the in memoriam montage for Lynne Marie Stewart so deeply moving. Also, Frank tricks Dennis and Dee into whacking off a dog.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: The Chair Company – “Nothing shows how far the boundaries of popular comedy have been pushed this century than the fact a show as singularly weird, intentionally uncomfortable and thrillingly bizarre as The Chair Company not only got a second season, but was a massive hit. I loved every cringe, baffling, sad minute of it.”
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OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR IN A COMEDY – Tim Robinson as William Ronald “Ron” Trosper in The Chair Company
Ciara: “In the first scene of the first episode, Tim Robinson as Ron insists that the restaurant they’re eating in is, if you think about it, a mall. It’s obviously not, but he doubles down. He’ll always double down. He’ll never let things go. That’s why slipping when he went to sit in a chair leads to him unravelling a conspiracy, or maybe just going insane. He is, in short, a Tim Robinson character.
In many ways Tim Robinson just does that one same thing over and over, but to be fair, nobody gets mad at an elite sportsperson for being too good at scoring. Tim Robinson is always giving a Tim Robinson Performance, but it is pitch perfect every time. The Chair Company gives him the most room to develop a character yet, playing out his one note until it becomes a desperately sad, hysterically funny symphony.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Ted Danson as Charles Nieuwendyk in A Man on the Inside – “Television’s truest living star keeps the flame alive in a turn so delightful that I didn’t even resent his character for being a retiree taking a lecturing job at a university.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Ryan McParland in Pushers – “Ryan McParland is a revelation in Pushers, as the one (ostensibly) non-disabled member of the gang. He plays the Mancunian accent both deep and broad, displaying an astounding talent for turning lines into jokes just by saying the words funny. The fact he brings spades of pathos to the role is just gravy.”
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OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTRESS IN A COMEDY – Jean Smart as Deborah Vance and Hannah Einbinder as Ava Daniels in Hacks
Dean: “I don’t know if we’ll ever see a duo as magnetic as Smart and Einbinder on television again. Their characters so vividly realised that it feels kind of absurd they aren’t real. Each of them incredible in their own right, but just like their characters, they also brought the best out of each other time and again.
Hacks was never exactly subtle with the homoerotic content of Deborah and Ava’s relationship, so it was inevitable that they would end up in a mistaken-for-lesbian farce at some point, but there is nothing obligatory about how it plays out when it comes. Ava’s needless aggression because she’s upset with Deborah for lying again, Deborah’s endlessly failed efforts to seem like someone who has ever touched another woman’s body, their common inability to not sound like a fighting couple even when they’re not pretending to be one. All hilarious, and so much funnier because it’s part of a heist to steal a Carol Burnett outfit from a rival comedian.
They sound like a fighting couple even when they’re not pretending to be one because they are, of course, a fighting couple. Not lovers, but not less than lovers either, and the story of their friendship and creative partnership across five seasons was a romance for the ages.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Rachel Sennott as Maia Simsbury in I Love LA – “Rachel Sennott captures Maia’s simultaneous emotional regression and professional development as so deeply intertwined they can’t be untangled. She’s horrible. I love her.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Wendy McLendon-Covery as Joyce Henderson in St. Denis Medical – “Joyce spends most of the second season of St. Denis Medical having a series of increasingly dramatic meltdowns as she works to get the hospital’s new birthing centre up and running, and McLendon-Covey perfectly ratchets up the comic escalation each time, culminating in a catastrophic public breakdown at its grand opening. A perfect comedic arc, expertly pursued.”
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OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A COMEDY – Glenn Howerton as Dennis Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Ciara: “I was quite shocked, even aggrieved, to discover Glenn Howerton had never won a Sundae Award for acting. This isn’t just a make-up win though. Howerton has been delivering one of the best performances in the history of television for over two decades as Dennis Reynolds, and season 17 of It’s Always Sunny gave him as much to sink his teeth into as any season yet.
Dennis is rotten to the core, and like all rotten things, is terribly fragile. The Gang getting old is a theme that ran through this season, and perhaps no-one is as sensitive to it as Dennis. The once Golden God has become essentially reptilian-looking, which Howerton leans into for all its worth, taping back the skin on his face to hide his wrinkles. The move Howerton makes when Charlie asks if he wears a wig and reaches ever so slightly encapsulates in just a second or two how vested Dennis is in the maintenance of his carefully crafted façade. That’s always been true, but it just gets truer and truer with time.
Howerton plays the façade with equal gusto. When Dennis is in self-appointed leader mode, pontificating on bullshit and bossing people around, Howerton soars. Sexing up slap fights, microdosing peppers while pretending to be EMTs, sleeping with teenagers in elaborate revenge plots. The way he talks about the cybertruck takes up the entirety of whatever space in my brain is occupied by the cybertruck. I love how much smarter he thinks he is than the rest of the Gang, and how rarely that bears true.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Joseph Tudisco as Mike Santini in The Chair Company – “The Chair Company’s supporting cast has a host of oddball performances by apparent non-actors, and Joseph Tudisco initially seems like one of those. But the longer he’s on screen, the more layers he peels back on this strange man: Tudisco never dials down the absurdity of Mike’s character to bring out an extraordinary pathos. Get the man a Wikipedia page already.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Donald Faison as Dr. Chris Turk in Scrubs – “Turk confessing his loneliness and burnout to J.D. was the moment I realised that, against all odds, Scrubs hadn’t missed a step. It’s still the same mix of silly, serious and sentimental that made it one of my first favourite shows. Turk and Carla trying to get a J.D. a date without sounding like a couple looking for a third was also a delight.”
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OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY – Mary Steenburgen as Mona Margadoff in A Man on the Inside
Dean: “Mary Steenburgen is always radiant, but she truly shines as Mona in the sweetly romantic second season of A Man on the Inside. It would be so easy for casting Ted Danson’s real-life wife as his love interest to play like a cheap gimmick, but their screen chemistry is incredible, not because they’re husband and wife, but because they’re two of the greatest actors the US has ever produced.
Mona is everything Danson’s Charles is not: spontaneous, free-spirited, emotionally open, excited by life and its possibilities. She wanders off mid-conversation to write down bits of music that pop into her head, including during her meet-cute with Charles. She challenges him to dream bigger, live happier. You never doubt for a minute why he’s so instantly smitten with her, why making her laugh once makes him want to make her laugh again and again.
But she’s always more than a late-in-life dream girl, she’s a fully-rounded character with her own life, values, ambitions and flaws. Her thoughtlessness at Thanksgiving, poo-pooing the bit where everyone says what they’re grateful for – Charles’ favourite part – and her genuine bafflement when she realises he’s upset with her are exemplary of Steenburgen’s character work in the season, well-worn rom-com territory made fresh anew in the hands of one of the very best.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Robby Hoffman as Randi in Hacks – “The grounded deadpan in a world of high camp hysteria, Robby Hoffman is the secret ingredient in the Hacks formula. Direct, boring, fastidious, and really, really funny.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Kaitlin Olson as Dee Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – “Even after witnessing her greatness yearly for more than a decade, I was still caught off-guard by how movingly Kaitlin Olson played Dee’s sincere grief when she thought Frank had died. Also she really gives it welly in the dog track episode, where Frank has Dee and Dennis eating dog food and wanking off dogs. Truly one of the all-time greats.”
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OUTSTANDING WRITING IN A COMEDY – Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs & Jen Statsky for Hacks: “Hacks”
Dean: “Sticking the landing is one of the hardest parts of making television. For shows fortunate enough to reach their own finishing line before the money men kill them, putting a button on the cumulative filmed hours and behind-the-scenes years of a project is almost too easy a hurdle to fall at. So when a show sticks the landing this well, it must be celebrated.
‘Hacks’ earns the use of the show title as the finale title by embodying all the greatness of the series in one tremendous final outing. It’s the end of this story and the beginning of another chapter we won’t see, the culmination of every character arc, and an episode that stands entirely on its own brilliance. It’s one last ride for Ava and Deborah – and a final pyrrhic victory for Jimmy and Kayla – but also the pilot backwards and in heels.
Most crucially of all, it’s so funny. In just the first five minutes, you have Marty giddily asking for June off to race cars before his first day at his new job has even started, Josefina promoting herself to ‘lifestyle concierge’ with a pay bump taken from Damien’s salary, and Mayor Jo slicing her hand open when she gives the casino a ship christening. (‘No one asked you to do that.’ ‘You don’t have to, I’m the god damned Mayor.’) I put off watching this show for so long because I didn’t believe it could be as funny as people said. It is. It was. All the way to the end.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Trey Parker for South Park: “Got a Nut” – “South Park’s all-out assault on Trump 2.0 was a delight to behold, and reaches particular delights here. Kristi Noem – then Secretary of Homeland Security – shoots so many dogs in this episode. Just so many. Including Krypto the Superdog.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Loren Brouchard & Nora Smith for Bob’s Burgers: “Grand Pre-Pre-Pre-Opening” – “It showed an impressive level of restraint for Bob’s Burgers to wait 14 actual calendar years to do a flashback episode to both Tina’s birth and the opening of the restaurant. It’s even more impressive that this is basically a perfect episode of Bob’s Burgers, not least that the impetus for the flashback is the kids deciding to record an album about ‘how two generations of a family were destroyed by a burger restaurant’.”
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OUTSTANDING DIRECTING IN A COMEDY – Dave & John Chernin for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: “The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time”
Ciara: “To prepare for Frank’s hometown visit on The Golden Bachelor, the rest of the Gang naturally hold a series of focus groups on their dinner conversation, only to become something of an underground theatre hit among people who like, I don’t know, gay vampires and rubber chickens. It is classic the-Gang-having-esoteric-rules-in-their-own-parallel-society Sunny, complete with failed backflips, failed punchlines, and failed shampooing. (Charlie nairs all his hair off, and the audience assumes he has cancer.)
But the direction in ‘The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time’ plays with audience identification in interesting ways. One moment, the viewer is positioned as one among the test audience: they cheer at Charlie coming through the door like the audience on Seinfeld cheer for Kramer. But in the next moment, we observe the test audience as their own distinct brand of freaks: perspective shift as metacommentary. But the standout moment is in the long close-up of Dennis delivering a creepy, intense monologue about how he needs the audience to see him as ‘refined and dignified and not the least bit abnormal in any way.’ On paper, especially when he reveals he’s still upset about how Family Fight went down, it would be easy to make a patented Dennis meltdown; instead, with the camera trained on his taped up visage, he seems like Nosferatu.”
Ciara’s Runner-Up: Andrew DeYoung for The Chair Company: “I said to my dog “How do you like my hippie shirt?”” – “I love it when all the threads of a season of television come together in totally unexpected ways, and I love it even more when it happens just in time to unravel entirely next episode. The shot of Tim Robinson’s face at the end of ‘I said to my dog…’ will live forever.”
Dean’s Runner-Up: Samantha Gray for Strip Law: “I Was a Teenage Lawbert”: “Strip Law was too good for this world, too pure(ly funny). In its best outing, Sheila and Irene are told to reshoot ten seconds of their law firm’s ad, a storyline so funny I keep forgetting it also has a really funny B-plot about Lincoln and Glem doing jury selection. The titular Lawbert is ‘God’s perfect law baby’, a mascot Irene creates by combining ‘the warmth of Elmo, the quiet dignity of Frankenstein, the revolutionary spirit of Bob Marley, and eyes, like Mozart’, a sleepless being who ‘runs on cotton candy and human fear’. You know, like Grimace.”
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The Sundae 