As I previously mentioned, I have a hard time with the Emmys. If Game of Thrones illustrates the television academy’s slow-on-the-uptake ways, then nothing better captures the essence of “Emmy fatigue” than Julia Louis-Dreyfus. JLD won her sixth Emmy as an actress in a comedy series, of which four are for Veep. She has won the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Emmy every year since Veep began. And she’s great on Veep, which is a uniformly excellent show, truly one of the best comedies on TV. It’s not that I begrudge her these wins, although she does have four Emmys for playing the same character while Amy Poehler never won once for Leslie Knope.
We’ve talked before about the gap between television and film, and how over the last fifteen years or so that gap has narrowed, thanks to the increasingly cinematic nature of television, but one area where TV still feels inferior is the Emmys. It’s like they don’t want to engage with the crazy rich landscape of TV. Television is so good right now you could reward a different show every year and still not get through all the deserving stuff. But it’s good enough for the television academy to keep handing it to JLD. I don’t have a solution—the best I’ve come up with is a one-and-done rule that once you win for a specific show you’re done until you’re on a new show—but the Emmys feel unimportant because there’s little real drama. Everyone knows that JLD is a great comedic actress, no one is going to dispute that. It’s just that watching the same person win the same category for the same character is…not exciting.
Also not exciting is JLD’s dress. It’s by SAFiYAA and it looks like something a chaperone at prom wears. Even JLD looks bored with winning Emmys every year.
