Emmys 2017: nominations, winners, and highlights

Every year, TV’s most beloved actors assemble to celebrate themselves and their colleagues. To do so, they generally wear a variety of pretty, boring gowns and dull, poorly hemmed tuxedos.

Which is certainly a reasonable choice: Actors are heavily judged by their appearances, but most of them aren’t paid to know or care much about exciting and interesting fashion. Something pretty and safe is the smart choice for most actors — but for those of us at home on the couch, it sure does make for a boring red-carpet show.

The 2017 Primetime Emmy Awards weren’t bad!

That might sound like damning with faint praise, but when you consider that the Emmys are pretty regularly the most boring awards show of them all (yes, even more boring than the Oscars), it’s a real treat to be able to say, “Emmys, you were probably more interesting than the 2017 Tony Awards.”

To conclude his opening monologue at the 2017 Emmys, host Stephen Colbert took a moment to express some hope that this year’s ceremony would draw a record-breaking audience — and then, to preemptively confirm it, invited none other than Sean Spicer to the stage.

As the audience gasped, Spicer wheeled out a podium and bellowed, “This will be the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period, both in person and around the world.”

The 2017 Primetime Emmy Awards aired on Sunday, September 17, and honored the best TV series and performances that aired between June 2016 and May 2017.

No doubt each year’s Emmys ceremony has its own dominant storylines (the 2016 Emmys largely belonged to Game of Thrones and Veep, for example). This year, the biggest stories were HBO’s Big Little Lies winning five awards, notably in the Outstanding Miniseries, Outstanding Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress in a Miniseries categories, Outstanding Directing in a Miniseries, and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries categories.

The last time a black actor won the Lead Actor in a Drama Series trophy, it was Andre Braugher for Homicide, back in 1998. And the last time an actor in a broadcast series won this prize, it was James Spader for ABC’s Boston Legal in 2007.

Sterling K. Brown’s highly deserved win for This Is Us, then, stood out in multiple ways. (Broadcast dramas, in particular, have struggled mightily in the 2010s, with This Is Us the first nominated for Drama Series since The Good Wife in 2011.)

Sunday’s Emmys Awards brought a staunchly anti-Trump edition of the annual ceremony — and perhaps no moment was more political than the feisty reunion of Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Jane Fonda. The three stars of the hit ’80s film 9 to 5 minced few words in terms of implying that President Trump is a sexist bigot.

After the Hollywood legends were greeted with an instant standing ovation from the audience at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, the perpetually luminous Parton kicked things off by commenting that she’d been wanting a reunion of the famously feminist farce ever since its 1980 release. And Fonda, the most notoriously outspoken of the trio, ran with the movie’s theme of standing up to sexism, noting, “Back in 1980, in that movie, we refused to be controlled by a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”

The 2017 Primetime Emmy Awards didn’t have any shocking live-television moments — nobody fell down or gave out the wrong prize — but they did deliver when it came to setting new milestones for both the awards themselves and the television industry more broadly.

Here are six ways the 2017 Emmys set new records and milestones for awarding excellence in television. If the awards were any indication, the future of the Emmys is going to be more diverse — and less bound to traditional means of distribution.

At Sunday’s Emmy Awards, Donald Glover won two Emmys for his work on Atlanta: one for Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series, and one for Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Series. In both cases, his win was a milestone.

Only one other black actor has ever won the award for Best Actor in a Comedy: Robert Guillaume, for Benson, in 1985. And no black director has ever won the award for Best Directing in a Comedy.

At the 2017 Emmy Awards, while accepting his trophy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series, John Oliver reminded viewers what’s behind much of the success of his hit HBO comedy show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver: virality.

Oliver has influenced the masses time and again since his hit news commentary series debuted in 2014, and in many different ways, from repeatedly crashing the Federal Communications Commission’s website over his calls to defend net neutrality to persuading New York City to relax its harsh bail requirements.

When CBS tapped Stephen Colbert to host the 2017 Emmys — his first awards show ever — the network had to know that its firebrand Late Show host wouldn’t avoid politics. But for a minute, that’s exactly what Colbert did, albeit with a giant wink.

The show opened with Colbert backstage, acknowledging to nominees Anthony Anderson and Allison Janney that the world is a scary place right now before insisting that they can always distract themselves with the warm embrace of television. “Turn on any channel — well, except the news,” crooned Colbert. “The world’s a little better on TV!”

Since Shailene Woodley broke out of her Secret Life of the American Teenager pigeonhole with The Descendants in 2011, two things about her have remained constant. First, she is a gifted actress who almost always turns in an excellent performance, no matter what role she’s playing. Second, she will make a point of establishing her hippie chick bona fides in every interview she gives, and it will range from charming to hilarious to annoying.

And at the 2017 Emmys, Woodley stuck to her pattern. She was very good on Big Little Lies, for which she received an Emmy nomination. She also kicked off the night by telling a red-carpet interviewer that she doesn’t even own a TV because she prefers to read, like a parody of an insufferable person from the mid-’90s, before we all started talking about how TV is just as intellectually stimulating as books are these days.

The 2017 Emmy Awards are upon us, airing live this Sunday, September 17, at 8 pm Eastern/5 pm Pacific on CBS, though you can also watch the show online at CBS All Access. Stephen Colbert is set to host.

One of the major stories this time around is in the drama categories. Stalwarts like Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones aren’t in the running this year — the former ended before last year’s awards, and the latter didn’t air its season within the eligibility window. (The same goes for the Twin Peaks revival, which won’t be eligible until the 2018 awards.)

The 2017 Emmys — airing live on Sunday, September 17 at 8 pm Eastern on CBS and CBS All Access — could make for a particularly interesting ceremony.

For one, The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert will be hosting — and if you can believe it, this will be the first awards show he’s ever hosted. For another, the drama categories this year offer a rare opportunity for a real shake-up, with new shows like This Is Us, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Crown, Westworld, and Stranger Things dominating the nominations. (Westworld tied Saturday Night Live for the most nominations across the board, at 22, while Stranger Things netted 18; both Westworld and Stranger Things then pulled ahead at last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys, racking up several wins in the technical categories.)

Of all the major awards shows, the Emmys are often the most derided. (Well, it’s them or the Grammys.) There are so, so, so many categories, often with completely nonsensical names or hard-to-understand distinctions. The same programs and performances keep getting nominated, even after they’re well past their prime. And the winners often make no sense.

But the 2017 Emmys might — might — be different. For starters, there are the five first-time nominees for Drama Series, which have instantly shaken up that race. (It also helps that Game of Thrones, which won in 2015 and 2016, was ineligible in 2017.) The limited-series categories are as competitive as they’ve been in more than a decade, and are crammed full of major movie stars. The comedy categories seem slightly less poised for surprise, but there’s a chance for at least one major record to be tied there.

Do the Emmys matter?

It’s a question TV fans ask a lot, since the awards, after all, can seem to actively avoid honoring the best television out there, in favor of giving out dozens of prizes to the same-old, same-old. But it’s also a question TV fans have been asking for years, and it’s one the Emmys have slowly but surely been chipping away at over the past several decades.

When Susan Jacobs took home the first-ever Outstanding Music Supervision Emmy Award at the Creative Arts Emmys on September 10 for her work on the HBO miniseries Big Little Lies, her win represented not only a triumph for the veteran TV music supervisor but a major milestone for an industry that has been instrumental in shaping some of television’s most memorable scenes.

Whether it was Sia’s “Breathe Me” on Six Feet Under, or “Zou Bisou Bisou” on Mad Men, or that infamous OC scene with Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” a well-placed song can amplify the emotional intensity and resonance of a moment, elevating it to fame. And while a flawless pairing of scene and soundtrack can feel perfectly serendipitous, these moments are almost always the result of someone poring through thousands of tracks and spending hours working with the show’s creative team to find exactly the right tune, to say nothing of securing permission to use it. That’s the job of the music supervisor, in a nutshell.

The first round of 2017 Emmy awards have officially been handed out — but if you blinked and missed them and are wondering if you somehow mixed up the date of this year’s ceremony, you’re not alone.

The Creative Arts Emmys were held on September 9 and 10, one week before the Primetime Emmy Awards (which will take place this Sunday, September 17), as per the annual tradition. The difference between the two ceremonies is simple: The Creative Arts Emmys focus on technical achievements like lighting, cinematography, editing, and so on, as well as several categories within the reality, animation, and documentary genres. In total, 92 different trophies were handed out at Sunday’s Creative Arts Emmys ceremony. But there’s no difference between the actual awards — anyone who wins at the Creative Arts Emmys versus the Primetime Emmys is still a bonafide Emmy winner.

The Emmys are hardly perfect. In fact, they’re frequently dumb, stupid, horribly infuriating, and hard to take.

Sure, they’ve gotten better in recent years, especially as they’ve increased the number of nominations in some categories and shaken up their voting processes. And TV has gotten better, too — it’s hard to imagine a world in which some categories see the exact same slate of nominees re-nominated year after year after year, as sometimes happened in the ’80s and ’90s.

The 2017 Emmy nominations were always going to go in a bit of a different direction than we’ve gotten used to in recent years. Not only is there more TV to choose from than ever, but some of the awards’ most reliable reigning champions — like Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey — weren’t eligible this year, leaving room for newcomers such as Stranger Things and This Is Us to sweep in and make their presence known.

But even while we expected a fair amount of upheaval, we still found ourselves pretty surprised by some of this year’s nominations — and omissions — in ways that ranged from great to bad to downright confusing. (And to be clear: “Surprises” isn’t the same as “snubs”; I’m not surprised that Netflix’s Stranger Things cleaned up while the final season of HBO’s excellent drama The Leftovers was almost completely shut out, but I’m not happy about it, either.)

The 2017 Emmy nominations were everything exciting and enervating about the Television Academy all at once.

The morning was buoyed by a record five new series nominated in the drama series category (a number that can’t be approached outside of the very early days of the Emmys, when everything was new), with one of those new shows, HBO’s Westworld, tying for the most nominations for any program with 22.

The nominations for the 69th annual Primetime Emmy Awards were announced Thursday in Los Angeles, with Veep’s Anna Chlumsky and Criminal Minds’ Shemar Moore reading the list of nominees in the Emmys’ most prominent categories. (The live-streamed announcement does not include the full list, which spans almost 100 categories in total.)

The 2017 Emmys are set to be a more interesting round of awards than usual, and not just because Stephen Colbert will be hosting the ceremony come September 17. Be sure to keep an eye on the drama categories in particular; this year offers a rare opportunity for a real shake-up.

Since the 2010 Emmys, 17 shows have been nominated for Outstanding Drama Series. They include among their ranks some of the best shows of this century to date — Mad Men and Breaking Bad and The Americans. They also include gigantic Emmy behemoths like Game of Thrones, and would-be awards monsters that eventually fizzled out, like Boardwalk Empire. And then there’s Dexter, because why not.

But between 2010 and 2016, there were 44 total slots available for Drama Series — and all 44 slots were filled by just those 17 shows. The Emmys, suffice to say, aren’t fond of nominating shows they’re not already familiar with.

When the Television Academy announces its Emmy nominations Thursday morning, several notable names will be missing from the list.

In some cases, the omissions will be self-explanatory. Game of Thrones may be the reigning champ of the Best Drama Series category, but it didn’t air a new season during the 2017 Emmys’ eligibility period, which ran from June 1, 2016, to May 31, 2017. (The last few episodes of the show’s sixth season, which aired in June 2016, were wrapped into its eligibility for the 2016 Emmys — and, indeed, it won writing and directing Emmys for one of them.)