The End of Predictable Expectations - 70th Primetime Emmys Post
DISCLAIMER: I did not make this fan art right after the Emmys without a reason
Before going on to the most unpredictable things happened during the 70th running of Primetime Emmy Awards, here's the first thing that makes the ceremony unpredictable even before it started: Monday. Yup, this year, the award show was live on Monday, and I was thinking that it'll be a usual Sunday business. I've missed almost the whole stuff due to the house chores I had to do in my usual 7am agenda: taking my brothers to their school, tidying up rooms, and breakfast. While I missed a couple of key moments in the awards outside of the award giving processes, I don't think I've missed too much this year as I don't think there aren't much stuffs that qualifies as major moments for me.
Apart from all the bombshell and the fact that this is the second consecutive year I pull an anime reference to my Emmys post ( last year's post was actually a nod to JoJo's Bizarre Adventures), the main Primetime Emmys ceremony awarded the best honors in series, acting, writing, and directing for comedies, dramas, television movies, limited series, and TV specials, as well as other genres. The diverse array of nominations made an interesting guesswork as to who would walk away with the coveted trophy, but the main talking points included whether how the showdown between Mrs. Maisel, Atlanta, and Barry in comedy categories would turn out, whether The Handmaid's Tale proved its strength for second year in a row, and whether The Assasination of Gianni Versace would score the same sweeping feat for American Crime Story series like The People v. O.J. Simpson did.
THE WINNERS
#ascversace wins! #Emmys2018 pic.twitter.com/RvABUrKmuu
- Tom Rob Smith 🇪🇺 (@tomrobsmith) September 18, 2018
The Comedy categories begun with Supporting categories in which Barry's Henry Winkler and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel's Alex Borstein winning their respective categories in Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress. Both winners scored their wins upon defeating favorites from Saturday Night Live, including, but not limited to, Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon who were last year's victors. The Directing and Writing prizes later were handed out to both Amy Sherman-Palladino of Mrs. Maisel, and both being pilot episodes in which they are nominated in the said categories. Rachel Brosnahan would later add another sweep charge with four wins after winning the Lead Actress category, with the Lead Actor went to Barry's Bill Hader who finally beat out Atlanta's Donald Glover, one of the favorites to win the category.
Netflix's new series Godless took both wins on Supporting categories for Limited Series and TV movies, being Jeff Daniels for Supporting Actor and Merritt Wever for Supporting Actress. William Bridges and Charlie Brooker scored Black Mirror their win for the "USS Callister" in Writing while it was Ryan Murphy who scored the first of The Assassination Of Gianni Versace's wins for Directing, and later extending the American Crime Story's second season courtesy of Darren Criss' Lead Actor win. Regina King's win in Lead Actress not only gave her the third win out of her four years of being nominated, but also clinched the fact that, with Alex Borstein, the former actress from Hilary Duff's projects won the television's most prestigious prize; King starred the waitress Rhonda in A Cinderella Story while Borstein played the principal Mrs. Ungermeyer in The Lizzie McGuire movie.
" #GameofThrones Is the #Emmys' Biggest Winner" (via @HBO): https://t.co/O6fDYrNvq4 pic.twitter.com/r2nD1PLRX7
- Game Of Thrones (@GameOfThrones) September 18, 2018
The Drama categories provided more upsets than the previous two categories, starting with Peter Dinklage's win in the Supporting Actor category, and Thandie Newton in Supporting Actress category, beating out their adversaries within their respective categories. The Crown and The Americans both scored two wins with one in the acting categories and one in technical categories each. The recently-concluded FX Series scored wins in Lead Actor with Matthew Rhys with Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields' written "Start" awarded them the Writing prize, with the Netflix series saw Stephen Daldry scoring a win for the Directing courtesy of the episode "Paterfamilias" and Claire Foy scoring for Lead Actress, all in what is dubbed as the show's final time with Claire Foy with the third season featuring new batch of actors.
The last outright categories saw three different winners across three different categories: The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story succeeded the second time an American Crime Story season scoring the series win after The People v. O.J. Simpson despite lacking dominance, with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel completing the show's award collection in its first year since Golden Globes, marking a successful outing for the Amazon Prime series. Finally, Game of Thrones is named the Outstanding Drama after beating out The Handmaid's Tale in an upsetting fashion.
With five wins, Mrs. Maisel ensured to be the big winner of the ceremony, with ACS Versace closing in with three wins, and most of the competitors received two. This is the first time since Modern Family conquered the ceremony outright with five wins in 2011 (in which the ABC comedy also tied with HBO's Game Change and Showtime's Homeland the year after with four wins), in addition to the first time a show from streaming service (for Mrs. Maisel's case, it's Amazon Prime) to have the most wins overall. However, with Creative Arts wins, Game of Thrones bested every other scripted show (excluding sketch) with seven wins, totaling it into nine wins across both Emmys. Following behind is Mrs. Maisel scoring eight wins total including three Creative Arts wins, tied with Saturday Night Live, and ACS Versace received four Creative Arts wins for a total of seven. Favorites Atlanta and The Handmaid's Tale, though winless in the telecast, all collected three through Creative Arts, along with Barry and Godless in regards to the number of wins (both shows only won one Creative Arts category). Finally, HBO and Netflix were joint winners in terms of networks with total wins, both scoring 23 wins across both ceremonies, while NBC is just up behind with 16.
And the award for first (and best) proposal at the #Emmys goes to! pic.twitter.com/SRXxlBpuoW
- IGN (@IGN) September 18, 2018
Other moments include Glenn Weiss, winner of Outstanding Directing For A Variety Show for his work on this year's Oscars, proposed his girlfriend Jan on stage (above) right after noting that he had recently lost his mother. Betty White, "The First Lady of Television", also made an appearance. The 96 year-old actress is known for her notable roles in The Golden Girls and Hot in Cleveland and already had eight Emmys, in addition to being the Guiness World Record holder for the Longest TV Career for an Entertainer (Female). not to mention the mysterious person who went to the ceremony as Teddy Perkins from Atlanta, to which people thought that it was Donald Glover and later Lakeith Stanfield. These moments however did not save the ceremony from the all-time low ratings, reported to have 10.2 million viewers compared to last year's 11.4 million, in addition to the "lackluster" hosting from Colin Jost and Michael Che according to Variety, in addition to Hollywood Reporter critic Daniel Fienberg slamming their flat monologue.
Complete list of winners, including those from other categories, can be seen here, as well as all the Creative Arts winners here, all courtesy of GoldDerby. Don't forget to check out the download section of Television Academy's official site for more information on the winners and nominations in printable format!
FINAL PREDICTION RIDE
Unfortunately due to the unpredictable nature of the ceremony I couldn't able to have my best result here (my predictions can be checked over here). 2/3 right predictions in the programming categories (already excluding the TV Movie category), absolutely nothing for Drama categories, 2/6 for Comedy categories, and finally 2/6 for Limited Series et. al. categories, for a total of... 6/21, absolutely the worst result of the year to conclude the chapter haha. That also concludes my year in TV awards predicting at 31/58 in total, about 53% predictions correct spanning all four award shows from January this year. Relying too much on last year's wins in Emmys factored in the dismal result, and it seemed like I forgot to include last year's predictions as a means of deliberating the prediction, because if I'm not mistaken Thandie Newton was in fact my last year's horse for the exact same category she won this year.
And apparently that's that for this year's predictions. Both movie predictions and TV predictions are about half right across every prestigious award show for this year. There's not much talk with all the upsets and results, but after browsing for a while my idea of a award prediction competition actually exists within GoldDerby's site. The site caters a competition for users who would wish to do some prediction in not just TV and movie awards, but also music awards as well, as well as several reality competition shows. With the "prediction as a sport" idea of mine already materializing, I think I might try my hands on that site next year before the Golden Globes, maybe making my own league with TV and movie awards in the roster.
In an unrelated note, the coefficient ranking update should come about... final weeks of November at latest, to wait on one upcoming vote-based awards show that will enter its second voting phase.
THE CHAPTER CLOSES
Time for a standing ovation! Congratulations to our marvelous cast and crew on 8 #Emmys wins! #MrsMaisel pic.twitter.com/5ybnvOPlep
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (@MaiselTV) September 18, 2018
As the Emmys nights went past and this year's awards season concluded, we have finally seen two different endings: the good ending, and the bad ending. The former is true for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel who finally completed its journey on sweeping awards since the Golden Globes, as well as the lead actress herself Rachel Brosnahan, settling the three-way rivalry, defeating the favorites, and named as the ones who ended Veep's streak upon the show's absence. Along with the comedy series, Game of Thrones, The Americans, and The Crown equally shared their good endings after defeating their biggest adversary in their categories, and finally The Assassination of Gianni Versace lived up to its expectations just like the previous American Crime Story season did. However, bad endings were in order for Atlanta and The Handmaid's Tale, walking out as favorites only to be rendered winless in the telecast, with their only wins reside in the depths of the Creative Arts, while Saturday Night Live lost out greatly in their second-favorite categories with only one telecast win. It is the end of the utter expectations for them.
But even with the said ending, the conclusion of the 2017 Awards Season chapter that we've gone past is actually the start of the new season for the television; will Game of Thrones, Barry, and ACS Versace be able to keep this momentum to Golden Globes in next January? Will The Handmaid's Tale and Atlanta fight back to avenge their upsets? Will there be more wins for Henry Winkler, Bill Hader, Matthew Rhys, and others next year? And how will things differ from the next awards from here? The cycle keeps repeating, but the next stage shall prepare for yet another exciting fight in the endless TV award saga! Parting ways do not apply, even for just one second. Therefore, the journey continues...
~[R]