I first want to say congratulations to all the 2025 Emmy nominees. I have quite possibly written something nice about most of you, and nothing (too) bad about any of you, and to those I never mentioned at all, it was simply a matter of not having the time or space to write about everybody and everything. No criticism should be inferred. I will be happy whoever wins, because, as much as I think that awards for any sort of creative work are bunk, winning is nice and comes with tangible benefits. And you have done something, sometime in your career, to merit recognition.
But to you who weren’t nominated, all you makers of television the Academy has overlooked, it’s worth saying, given all the energy, professional and amateur, that goes into fretting over who’s been picked and who’s been “snubbed” — quotes necessary, there being no cabal dedicated to denying anyone an Emmy — that your lack of official recognition is essentially meaningless. All that might be extrapolated from “qui est in, qui est out,” to quote the old Serge Gainsbourg song, is the narrow range of interest the nominations represent. The 2025 nominees, notwithstanding a few outliers, all come from a handful of shows, many making return appearances, repeating a pattern one sees year after year. The reasonable inference is that the voters don’t watch much television at all.
That isn’t true of every Academy voter, of course, but all we know in the end is who was nominated, not who might have been nominated if five votes had gone another way, or who, though not even close to being nominated, nevertheless had their champions within the electorate.
And I’m on record as a fan of many of these actors and shows. But many series and the people who make them are unlikely to ever be considered, belonging to the wrong sort of genre, or on the wrong sort of network, or lack word-of-mouth cachet, or are too marginal or weird or have no FYC promotional budget. It is true too that voters in all sorts of elections can be lazy in their choices. That’s been many of us at some time.
So, as we head down the road to the ceremony — Sept. 14 on CBS — when all but one contender in each category will become Emmy losers, I salute you, the un-nominated. Getting a show on the air, however good, is hard work, and though talent is, of course, variable, no one sets out to make bad TV. I might not have loved your show, but I respect the effort. (Nor am I so foolish as to believe I could do any better.) This is not damning with faint praise — every show has its fans, and it’s the mix of high, middle and low programming that gives the medium its flavor and makes it a friend to millions. Non-prestigious television, unstudded with stars, may be as exciting and original as the Big Thing Emmy handicappers regard as a sure thing, even more so.
Awards are beside the point.
