Emmys 2016: Nominees, winners, and highlights

Well, this is just unfair.

While we peasants sitting at home watching the Emmys from our couches had to sit through interminable brown bag lunch bits, those titans who were actually at the ceremony got to watch the kids from Stranger Things do a cute-as-a-button rendition of “Uptown Funk.“

The 2016 Emmys are in the books, and they were a nice mix of the completely expected and the pleasantly surprising.

Yes, both winners in the two big series categories — Comedy and Drama — were repeats.

People don’t typically watch the Emmy Awards to see interesting fashion.

Talking about Emmys fashion usually means talking about an array of pretty women in pretty gowns and whether or not an array of men in identical tuxedos have bothered to hem their trousers. (Usually not.) It’s not a place for daring or avant-garde looks.

When Master of None creators Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari won their first Emmy Award for Comedy Writing on Sunday, Yang took the stage and reminded everyone that “diversity” isn’t just a buzzword, but a real goal worth fighting for within the TV industry.

“There are 17 million Asian Americans in this country,” Yang said, clutching his Emmy next to a nodding Ansari, who was also nominated for Best Actor in a Comedy. “… and there are 17 million Italian Americans. They have The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos, we got Long Duk Dong. We have a long way to go.”

Nobody would confuse the 68th annual primetime Emmy Awards, held Sunday, September 18, in Los Angeles, with the kind of excellent TV they were purportedly meant to honor.

Though the show moved along at a brisk clip (and even ended on time!), too much of it felt like a rerun of earlier awards shows — from some of the more predictable winners to the fact that many of host Jimmy Kimmel’s comedy bits have been done before.

During the 2016 Emmys, if you had tried to play a drinking game that involved the rule, “drink whenever someone mentions ‘diversity,’” you might have died.

With more and more voices outside Hollywood’s white and male stalwarts getting chances to speak and amplify each other, “diversity” has become a go-to buzzword for the entertainment industry. More and more executives are touting their (slowly) growing nonwhite talent numbers with pride, pointing to their hiring of this actor or that producer of color as proof that they, too, care about including a more diverse cross-section of people in their projects.

Late in her speech after winning the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Made for TV Movie, Sarah Paulson gave a shout-out to Marcia Clark, the woman she played on television in FX’s nine-time Emmy winning The People v. O.J. Simpson.

Paulson said she had, like so many Americans, reduced Clark, the lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, to a two-dimensional person, to someone it was easy to make the butt of a joke. But as she got to know the former attorney, Paulson found herself realizing just how badly that caricature missed the mark of the real woman.

The 68th annual Emmys are over.

Some of our predictions came true, but many did not. Surprises abounded — some good, some less so. As expected, Veep, Game of Thrones, and The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story were the big winners of the night in the show categories.

In what is surely an unprecedented move, the Emmys made the annual accounting segment something worth rewatching — and it’s all thanks to Leslie Jones.

Shortly after the wild celebrations that ensued after Jones’s fellow SNL cast member/Ghostbuster Kate McKinnon won her Emmy, Jones took to the stage with the Emmys accountants as they explained the work that goes into keeping the Emmys results confidential and untampered-with.

One of the biggest television stories of 2016 was the focus on the O.J. Simpson trial and Simpson himself, via two different miniseries. FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story and ESPN’s O.J.: Made in America were two standout, very important shows.

This didn’t go unnoticed at the Emmys. Not only was The People v. O.J. Simpson nominated 22 times for various awards, but host Jimmy Kimmel called out the moment during his opening monologue. And he made it just awkward enough for everyone involved.

Turns out Jeb Bush can be really funny when he wants to be.

Bush, the former governor of Florida and “low-energy” adversary to eventual Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, made an appearance at the 2016 Emmys and was actually the best part of the ceremony’s opening bit.

The 2016 Emmy Awards arrive Sunday, September 18, to honor the best television of the 2015-’16 TV season. And predicting them, sadly, is a bit of a cinch.

Before the 2015 Emmys, it was generally possible to make predictions based entirely on which episodes the various nominees submitted for voting consideration. The system wasn’t foolproof, but it usually allowed you to narrow the field to a handful of plausible winners based solely on the work being judged.

Ready your righteous TV opinions: The 2016 Emmy Awards are upon us, airing live on Sunday, September 18, at 8 pm Eastern/5 pm Pacific on ABC. (You can also watch the ceremony via live stream on ABC’s website or the network’s ABC.com app.) Jimmy Kimmel is set to host.

The 2016 nominations were particularly strong, reflecting a particularly strong year of television. Game of Thrones earned the most nominations of any individual show, with 23. In fact, the show is already a frontrunner to take home the most trophies this year. It won nine awards on September 11 at the Creative Arts Emmys, which cover the technical awards like production design and cinematography, as well as the guest acting categories.

For casual TV fans, Game of Thrones‘ massive Emmy sweep in 2015 — it won 12 prizes, the most for any show in a single season — likely seemed as if it were a long time in coming. After all, the show is one of TV’s biggest, and the Emmys’ reluctance to embrace it had seemed weird at best and biased against fantasy shows at worst. (After the Creative Arts Emmys — which were held earlier this month and reward below-the-line technicians — Game of Thrones season six has already won nine trophies, putting it well on its way to besting its record-breaking haul for season five.)

Similarly, Jon Hamm winning last year for Mad Men’s final season after eight previous nominations probably seemed to most TV fans like sweet awards justice after years of disappointment.

Among the 16 acting categories that span the Emmys’ comedy, drama, and limited series/made-for-TV movie classifications, there are 97 different actors nominated for the 2016 awards. (Fifteen categories feature six nominees, and one features seven, due to a tie.)

In 2016, by my count, 21 of those 97 are actors of color. That’s a little better than one in five, or 20 percent. Every single lead acting category contains at least one nonwhite nominee, and several of the acting categories are split 50-50 between white actors and actors of color.

It’s been an eventful year for FX’s spy drama The Americans.

The show’s fourth season — which aired from March through June — proved to be its most acclaimed yet, winning plaudit after plaudit, as well as a second consecutive Best Drama trophy from the Television Critics Association. In late May, the series was renewed for two final seasons, of 13 and 10 episodes, respectively, that will air in 2017 and 2018.

The 68th annual Primetime Emmy Award nominations were announced this morning in Los Angeles. Black-ish’s Anthony Anderson and Gilmore Girls’ Lauren Graham announced the nominees in several categories. Each year, the Emmys hand out prizes in nearly 100 categories — but only a handful are announced during the live broadcast.

You can watch the announcement in the video above (it starts at around 22:50).

Despite how it might seem sometimes, Emmy nominations are not decided by random happenstance. They are the result of a long and complicated process involving For Your Consideration campaigns from studios and networks, one that is more far-reaching and calculated than you might expect.

To get a sense of just how far-reaching and calculated it is, you need look no further than Emmy nominations ballot, or essentially the nominations for the nominations. It’s an overwhelming document, featuring dozens upon dozens of actors and TV shows submitting themselves for consideration. When I tried to scroll to the bottom of just the writing category for the 2016 awards, my hand cramped up around page 70 of 96(?!).