Fallout has all the hallmarks of contemporary Emmys bait: a call sheet studded with noms and winners of years past, a pair of buzzy executive producers, a Television Academy warmed to sci-fi and genre in recent years. But one thing stands in its way: Prime Video’s stubborn insistence on a binge episode-release strategy.

To binge-release or not has been debated for as long as streaming TV has existed, and at the Emmys, there are cases for and against it. The Crown has never suffered in the awards department for Netflix dropping entire seasons at once. Binge releasing has been Netflix’s calling card since the beginning, and the streamer has nabbed Outstanding Drama Series nominations for everything from Ozark to Bridgerton to Stranger Things. But The Crown’s 2021 victory remains the only Drama Series win for a binge release. For viewers (like me) who prefer a week-to-week release, this makes sense: “Appointment viewing,” while a steadily dwindling phenomenon, still gives shows more time to drive conversation, spark theories, and get viewers excited for each new episode. Series that have managed to merit Emmys drama distinction recently — Succession, The White Lotus, Game of Thrones, Better Call Saul — all followed the traditional weekly schedule. Streaming platforms have begun to get a taste for this as well; by the time shows like Severance (Apple TV+) and Andor (Disney+) reached their season finales, fans and critics alike had built up anticipation and hype for episode drops. Both were rewarded with Emmy nominations.

Prime Video’s Emmys success has mostly been relegated to the comedy categories, specifically The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Generally speaking, the comedy categories have been marginally friendlier to binge-release shows, considering the reigning champion, The Bear (FX’s baffling insistence on unleashing the show all at once is a topic for another newsletter). But the majority of Outstanding Comedy Series wins for streamers have still gone to weekly-release shows like Fleabag and Ted Lasso. In drama, Amazon has been nominated only once, for the second season of The Boys, a show that … moved from a binge drop to a week-to-week release in its second season. (It’s worth noting that while Mrs. Maisel enjoyed its best Emmys successes as a binge release in seasons one and two, the show did transition to weekly episode drops for its fourth and fifth seasons.) This year has the potential to be Prime’s best Emmys showing yet with both Fallout and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Both shows were binge releases, and, I’d say, not coincidentally, both shows got a flash of publicity and chatter in the public square before the culture moved on to the next show it had to ingest in the span of a weekend. Meanwhile, say what you will about series like The Morning Show and The Gilded Age — they may be slowly unfolding car wrecks, but people do tune in every week for multiple weeks to rubberneck at the madness.

Fallout would have been an incredible show to follow week-to-week, full of twists and turns and fringe characters coming into their own. The postapocalyptic world-building, adapted from the popular video-game series by showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet and EPs Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, feels like a snowball rolling downhill, picking up speed and substance as it goes. Fallout manages to blend the grimy, gloopy postnuclear world of giant bugs and blown-off limbs (the violence dovetails with a show like The Boys, lending Prime Video its first real sense of house style) with a sophisticated observation of the ways power and greed are hurtling us toward an endgame only the powerful and greedy can profit from.

Great performances more often than not need and deserve time to settle in, and Fallout has a few that should by all rights be in Emmys contention. Walton Goggins stands the best chance in Lead Actor; he’s the (ghoulish) face of the show, essentially plays two characters (even if they’re the same person), and is a former nominee for Justified. Elsewhere, Ella Purnell’s time on Yellowjackets could give her something of a “hey, we know you” boost in Lead Actress. In the supporting categories, Aaron Moten boasts the most screen time, though I wonder if the work he’s doing is too understated to make enough of an impression. Moisés Arias, as Purnell’s brother who gets left behind in the Vault to discover some dark secrets on his own, holds up an entire subplot, which ought to count for something. Sarita Choudhury appears in half of the season’s episodes, bumping her up to Supporting Actress status, though her dynamic performance really gets to blossom only in the season finale — she would have been a better contender in Guest Actress. Kyle MacLachlan and Emmy fave Michael Emerson will contend for Guest Actor. With the exception of Goggins, I’d say all these performances have longer odds at nominations than they should because only one month after the premiere of Fallout, nobody’s talking about it. This is basic marketing math, and Amazon keeps getting the equation wrong.

As for whether Fallout itself can find its way into a decidedly soft and squishy Outstanding Drama category, the answer is yes, it can. The Television Academy has been coming around to genre shows for the past several years. Everyone looks to Game of Thrones for opening the genre doors and The Handmaid’s Tale’s 2017 win for breaking ground for streaming series. But they had literary pedigree and Shakespearean themes of dynasty and betrayal, respectively. The Mandalorian, Severance, and The Boys, all recent Drama Series nominees, opened the doors for Fallout. Every one of those shows used a weekly episode release to build momentum, enthusiasm, and, most important, praise. The culture — awards voters included — needs time to acclimate to the idea that a show from an often junky genre is good. That takes time and repetitive praise. Netflix pulls this off with its binge releases because it has a massive user base (outpacing Amazon Prime Video by about 100 million users) and can employ those superior viewership numbers to bullhorn their way into the discourse. No other streamers have managed to succeed at this. But they succeed at the wars of attrition: another enthusiastic episode review for Andor, another round of Twitter discussion about this week’s Severance. Fallout could have used that kind of rollout. Now, it’s going to have to remind voters it exists all over again.

Deadline is reporting that Hiroyuki Sanada has closed a deal to appear on a second season of Shogun. Said second season hasn’t yet been announced by FX, but this appears to be a major domino to tip things toward that eventuality. A second-season announcement would move Shogun from the limited-series categories to drama, which would shake up the Emmys-nomination race significantly. I argued in this space a few weeks ago that the drama categories were there for the taking if Shogun wanted to make the jump. The Crown is the assumed front-runner, but it’s ripe for a takedown after an underwhelming final season.

The Hollywood Reporter noted this week that Ken Watanabe will be competing as Lead Actor in a Drama for Tokyo Vice, placing him side by side with first-billed star Ansel Elgort. While the show’s initial outing was ignored on the Emmys front, its second season has drawn a ton of critical praise — lots of “Best TV Show You’re Not Watching” headlines out there — and despite existing under the umbrella of Max’s chop-happy David Zaslav, there has even been optimistic talk of a season-three renewal. A rapturously reviewed series with a cinematic look and feel and the Michael Mann imprimatur — from the HBO family of products, no less! — could look pretty good in a year when the drama categories are grasping for contenders. And a former Oscars nominee like Watanabe would have the gravitas to draw some votes his way.

Speaking of the drama categories, the smartest move Disney+ could make this awards season would be to push for an X-Men ’97 nomination for Outstanding Drama Series. For one thing, the show is incredible: The way series creator Beau DeMayo and his writing and production teams have picked up from where the original X-Men: The Animated Series left off in 1997 and seamlessly translated that style (something completely different in tone and voice from anything else in the Marvel universe at the moment) while thematically bringing the show into the present day has been nothing short of astonishing.

The reception has also been hugely positive at a time when the Marvel Cinematic Universe is at its nadir from both storytelling and viewer-enthusiasm standpoints. Disney’s Emmys strategy appears to be to pushing Loki and Ahsoka in the drama category, where it has previously had success with The Mandalorian. But the vibes are off now with middling-to-bad reviews for Loki’s second season and the Star Wars spinoff Ahsoka. Even if Loki could limp into the Drama Series lineup on account of (have you heard?) the thin field of competitors, it would only call attention to what shabby shape the MCU is in.

Voters have already proved they will back superhero shows in the major categories. Sure, a Best Drama nomination for a show that got its start as a Saturday-morning cartoon for kids would be a big feat of salesmanship, but the rewards would be groundbreaking, headline-making. Last time this kind of thing happened was 2009 when a resurgent Family Guy worked its way into the Outstanding Comedy Series category.

Sometimes we get comments (or emails, or Slacks) that warrant further discussion. After last week’s newsletter about whether The Bear is unstoppable in the comedy categories, we got a few such comments:

“I love The Bear, but I cannot understand how it gets entered as a comedy for the Emmys. Are there funny moments? Sure. Succession had its darkly humorous moments too. That didn’t make it a comedy. The Bear is many things — dramatic, emotional, cathartic — but I wouldn’t call it a comedy.” —charlesn

This is a perfect Emmys question in that it has a clear, intuitive answer (The Bear is obviously a drama), but it touches on a ton of Emmys history, rules quirks, and voting tendencies. For a long time, distinctions between TV dramas and comedies were incredibly easy to make — all the serious shows were an hour long, while the comedies were half an hour and gave you a laugh track. The single-camera comedy era changed a lot, as did hourlong comedies like Ally McBeal and Desperate Housewives. Now, it’s a lawless country of blended genres and 41-minute episodes, and there are no longer any hard-and-fast rules about what determines comedy versus drama.

In 2015, the Television Academy set in place a rule that all one-hour shows were automatically categorized as dramas and all half-hour shows were comedies. It didn’t make much sense in that obviously a show can be purely comedic even if episodes last an hour (look at Glee), but at least it was a concrete rule. Of course, the Academy then immediately undercut its own directive by allowing shows to appeal their designations (and more often than not acquiescing to those appeals). The rule spent six years being largely ineffectual before being officially rescinded in 2021.

Strategically, there seems to be an impression that half-hour shows would be judged as too light to compete with hourlong dramas. I would defy anyone to say The Bear is too light to stack up against anything, which makes it the perfect show to test the waters in drama should the brass at FX decide to, but it’s understandable why they wouldn’t want to give up the advantage they currently hold in comedy. For better or worse, Emmy voters love to prioritize the more dramatic comedies. Ted Lasso is but one recent example of a comedy winner that was basically a light drama. You can go back to the heyday of the Showtime dramadies when United States of Tara and Nurse Jackie were racking up acting awards. The Bear is in the comedy race because the decision-makers at FX — perhaps rightly — assume it’ll do better there.

The solution seems simple, and it’s not — as many have suggested — to institute a “Dramedy” category. No, the real solution is to let the TV Academy draft a panel that reviews shows and places them in a category based on human judgment. No panel of living, breathing humans would watch The Bear and think, comedy. It’s just common sense. Other shows would be tougher calls (Palm Royale? Let’s have that discussion!), but the verdicts would be well considered.

“The thing for me is this is the perfect time to give It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia some flowers, even if it’s just in the form of nominations. Its last season started airing in June 2023, so it’s eligible this time. Like why not support a great show in this weird Emmys year? Especially since it’s still as good as it has been for a long while.” —chasgoose

As someone who drifted away from It’s Always Sunny around the time Mac started getting fat, ripped, and skinny for sport, I agree this should happen. There’s something cosmically unjust about actors like Glenn Howerton, Kaitlin Olson, and Charlie Day going two decades without so much as a nomination. Realistically, though, it’s going to be an uphill climb.

Emmys voters are famously stubborn; they decide within a show’s first few years whether they like it or not, and it’s exceedingly rare for them to suddenly come around on a show late in its run. When they do, there are usually extenuating circumstances. Zach Braff getting famous from Garden State made the Emmys suddenly pay attention to Scrubs, and the onset of the COVID pandemic turned Schitt’s Creek into the show that was holding our fragile psyches together with laughter and heart. Without that kind of a hook, it’s hard to imagine Emmys voters suddenly jumping Always Sunny up in their rankings. Especially since, as weird as this Emmys year is, the comedy category is decently stacked with The Bear, Hacks, Abbott Elementary, and Only Murders in the Building expected to hold strong.

Questions? Feedback? Predictions? Drop us a line at [email protected].

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