Awards Seasoning: The 2025 Emmy Awards Were Pretty Good
The Pitt and the Studio and Adolescence, oh my!
Putting the Emmys on the same Sunday that TIFF wraps up is frankly cruel to those critics among us who are still wrapping up festival coverage and struggling like crazy with jetlag. Come on, TV Academy, I am but a weak woman who doesn’t know what day of the week it is right now.
Anyway, the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards took place and the winners were pretty dang good. It helped that they had an enviable slew of choices to pick from, but even the hard choices at least left people feeling pretty satisfied in the end. The drama battle between The Pitt and Severence paid off bigger for the former but the latter wasn’t ignored either. The Studio was the big Best Comedy winner, because the industry loves itself a meta Hollywood tale, but who can be mad at Seth Rogen and company doing so well? Adolescence won Best Miniseries over The Penguin and dominated in those categories but it was the effervescent Cristin Milioti who won Lead Actress, then gave one of the best speeches of the night. The energy was unbeatable.
Honestly, the speeches all around were great. This was in spite of host Nate Bargatze's gimmick that, for every second an award winner's speech went over the 45-second limit, he'd take $1,000 away from a $100,000 donation he planned to make to the Boys & Girls Club of America. Similarly, for every second under the limit, another $1,000 would be added. A fun idea? Sure, but hoo boy, you could feel the stress in some nominees' eyes as they tried to make the biggest moment in their career into something pithy under threat of comedic blackmail. Yeah, we all knew that Bargatze wasn't going to cheat a charity out of money - the show ended with him saying that CBS would donate the full $100k and he'd add $250k on top – but this desperation to end an awards ceremony early always feels kind of mean. Just let it run over already. It happens once a year. Stop grumbling.
Some good moments: Owen Cooper becoming the youngest-ever Supporting Actor winner for Adolescence; Britt Lower's Severance speech including an Innie message on the back (I legit expected Kathy Bates to win this for Matlock); Tramell Tillman supremacy; a directing win for Slow Horses; a writing win for Andor (still annoyed Diego Luna wasn't nominated); the massive standing ovation for Stephen Colbert as he won Outstanding Talk Series (not huge on his "proud to be an American" speech though, but that's also just very Colbert); no offence to The Bear but aren’t we glad to see the comedy winners being, you know, actual comedies; Hannah Einbinder's iconic calls of F*ck ICE and Free Palestine, which were cool as hell and super brave given how the industry has treated any semblance of sympathy for those in the midst of a genocide.
Every couple of years, the Emmys will zag where we expect them to zig, going down their own path with an unexpected win that delights everyone. Consider Merritt Weaver in Nurse Jackie or Louie Anderson for Baskets. This year, we got Jeff Hiller for Somebody Somewhere. What a delightful choice, a lived-in and moving and funny performance in a little-seen show that just got cancelled. You could see how thrilled Hiller’s fellow nominees, especially Michael Urie and Bowen Yang, were for him. If the Emmys have a soft spot for one thing, it’s giving their flowers to those underappreciated character actors.
(Image via YouTube.)
The big downside to this all is that this was, even by the Emmys’ standards, a super-white evening. Did you know that Tramell Tillman is the first Black person to win in his category? It's 2025, kids (she's also the first openly gay person to do it.) It really does feel like the incremental progress the industry made in terms of inclusivity has been decimated, and it’s only going to get worse in the Trump age where everyone pretends that DEI is some nefarious scheme.
I don’t think any of these wins will inspire furious discourse, in fairness. Even Jean Smart winning her fourth Emmy in a row for Hacks doesn’t feel overdone because the fourth season offered her some of her best work and Einbinder was awarded alongside her. Sometimes, the Emmys dig in their heels and keep awarding the same things year after year even when the quality has dipped or the competition is greater. But this year, the big wins were new or newish, like The Pitt and The Studio. And many of the winners really had something to say in their speeches, even with the forced time crunch. Frankly, I never thought I’d hear “Free Palestine” at the Emmys. My general mood with any awards ceremony is, if it could have been a lot worse then it’s a success. But I think this was far better than “couldn’t have gone worse.” Was this… good?
I mean, they would have been great if you’d JUST NOMINATED INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE?!
