God bless Jean Smart, but I don’t know if I can watch her win another Emmy. She’s already collected three for her delicious work on Hacks—she’s never
God bless Jean Smart, but I don’t know if I can watch her win another Emmy. She’s already collected three for her delicious work on Hacks—she’s never been nominated for the series without winning—and this September she will likely be called to the stage for her fourth. John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, meanwhile, has won 30 awards in 11 years, and I can recite from memory his perennial speech thanking staff members in Brooklyn. Some 140 years ago, when Nietzsche advanced the concept of eternal return, he was talking about how tedious the Emmys are.
All this is not entirely the voters’ fault—television is built on multiseason series—but they’ll clearly vote for the same people over and over until they get carpal tunnel. The result is that the industry’s most respected awards show has been stagnant and zeitgeist-adjacent a long time. Even as a teen, I remember watching Frasier win best comedy series five years in a row and thinking, Is that all there is? The Emmys need more electricity and drama, by which I mean they need reality stars.
Yes, the Television Academy rewards reality TV, but mostly at the Creative Arts Emmys a week earlier, which has all the glitz and buzz of Air Force Two. The prime-time Emmys can start reinventing itself by adding two recent categories to the broadcast—one for best performance in a reality program and another for best performance in a reality competition. The former would bring stars like The Real Housewives of Potomac’s Gizelle Bryant, Salt Lake City Housewife Mary Cosby, and Love Is Blind’s Hannah Jiles into the drowsy theater. These are not women who are going to give polite speeches thanking their agents. These are women who know how to deliver. They will be a renewable resource of theatrics and priceless sound bites.
Reality competition, meanwhile, would recognize contestants from beloved series like Survivor, The Traitors, The Bachelor, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Contestants from Survivor can be weird, comical, savvy, and fiercely knowledgeable: Mike White was on the show long before he created The White Lotus and made brotherly incest a subplot of prestige TV. Reality series have given us charming, ruthless pop-culture icons like Parvati Shallow and Boston Rob, not to mention Gabby Windey, who’s a mixture of Luanne from King of the Hill and Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. Windey was put on this earth to be quoted and memed.
I’m suggesting these recent categories primarily to bring fun back to the Emmys, but let’s not forget that reality TV helps power every successful network and streamer. Last November, Comcast announced that it would spin off most of its linear cable networks into a separate company while retaining Bravo. If the Television Academy is concerned about the ratings of its awards show, it should let some of the most passionate fandoms into the tent. To treat a whole sector of programming as “less than” is to turn your back on relevance at a time when every pair of eyeballs matters. And if you’re not convinced that a reality TV performance could be worth honoring, direct your own eyeballs to Bob the Drag Queen’s speech at that memorable Traitors roundtable—it was a wig-snatching Shakespearean tour de force.
By the way, reality stars will make for great TV even when they lose because they won’t go quietly into the night. We know this from experience: Donald Trump has whined about losing out on an Emmy for The Apprentice for years and called the show “dishonest,” “a con game,” and “sooooo boring.” The first two criticisms are absurd. The third one’s worth thinking about.
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