5 Urgent Questions for the Limited Series Race

Because we’re in the thick of the Emmys race, it sometimes feels like we spend a disproportionate amount of time on the Drama and Comedy categories. But it’s only because that’s where the bulk of scripted programming resides. This year, 126 dramas submitted for Emmy contention, compared to 69 comedy shows and only 33 limited series. But limited series have always been TV’s preferred format for prestige programming, be it Roots or Band of Brothers or Angels in America. And since the streaming boom, the lines between ongoing dramas and limited series have blurred to the point where shows start off as the latter but become the former, with The White Lotus being the most celebrated example.

Last year’s Limited Series race was perfectly indicative of where the category stands now, with early favorite Shōgun — a high-production-value literary adaptation — ultimately getting renewed for a second season (and thus moving over to Drama Series, where it nearly swept the top awards), leaving room for Netflix’s buzzy trauma-com Baby Reindeer to ascend.

This year, Netflix, HBO, and FX are once again battling it out for Limited Series supremacy. Those three platforms have combined to win this category every year for the last 13 years. You have to go all the way back to the first season of Downton Abbey (which was initially considered a miniseries), back when the category was called Outstanding Miniseries or Movie, to find an outlier. Certainly a platform like Apple TV+ would love to break that streak, but this year’s contenders suggest that probably won’t be happening. Still, each of our ostensible Big Three platforms has a lot riding on the Limited Series race, and some are better positioned than others. Here, the five most urgent questions facing the competition ahead of nomination day.

Netflix had a very good night at the 2021 Emmys. The streamer finally won its first Outstanding Drama Series trophy, for The Crown, and scored an upset Limited Series victory for The Queen’s Gambit over HBO’s Mare of Easttown. It also collected five acting awards, the most of any other network or platform. The year before, Netflix collected a record-setting 160 Emmy nominations, finally besting rival HBO (which had 107) in the nomination tally. And while HBO clawed back on top for 2021, the margin was miniscule, with merely 130 total nominations to Netflix’s 129. The streamer was, at worst, neck and neck with HBO at the top of the prestige-TV food chain.

Unfortunately, Netflix has struggled to compete in the Drama and Comedy categories ever since. Last year’s 107 nominations once again led the overall Emmys field, but that number was fool’s gold; in its final season, The Crown limped across the finish line with only one major win (for supporting actress Elizabeth Debicki), while only one other Netflix show was nominated for Drama Series (remember 3 Body Problem??) and none were nominated for Comedy Series. In both 2020 and 2021, Netflix placed five shows in those top two categories. This year, while Netflix has likely nominees in the Comedy and Drama races, including new series The Four Seasons and Nobody Wants This and the second seasons of Squid Game and The Diplomat, none are expected to take home any major-category wins.

But Netflix continues to kick ass in Limited Series. That 2021 Queen’s Gambit win kicked off a run in which Netflix took home the Outstanding Limited Series Emmy in three of the last four years (Beef in 2023 and Baby Reindeer last year). Over that span, Netflix limited series have won six acting trophies, three directing awards, and two writing awards. Only HBO (six acting trophies, one directing award, and two writing awards) comes even close. Netflix is positioned to continue that dominance this year, with Adolescence — the four-part British series from writer-producers Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne about the aftermath of a 13-year-old boy murdering his classmate — practically lapping the competition. After dropping on Netflix in March, the series was immediately recognized as having the same combination of trenchant social commentary (in this case, a look at the manosphere-style toxicity that can poison young males at a shockingly early age) and daring formal style (each episode is a single continuous take) that boosted Baby Reindeer’s fourth-wall-breaking depiction of issues like queer identity and sexual assault last year.

Graham also stars in the series, playing the young boy’s father, and after years stealing scenes in small tough-guy parts in shows like Boardwalk Empire and films like The Irishman and Blitz, this unexpectedly tender role has him near the top of Best Actor predictions. His co-stars Owen Cooper (as his character’s son, Jamie), Ashley Walters (as the detective investigating the case), and Erin Doherty (as a court-appointed psychologist) are also strongly positioned for nominations.

Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story also stands a strong chance at more nominations for Netflix, particularly for stars Cooper Koch (as Erik) and Javier Bardem (as father Jose Menendez). Given that the first Monster series, about the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, pulled in 13 total nominations plus a win for supporting actress Niecy Nash-Betts, it would be foolish to overlook Murphy, whose shows tend to perform very well at the Emmys (54 wins and 270 nominations, all told).

There’s also Apple Cider Vinegar, the somewhat out-of-time series about real-life Australian wellness grifter Belle Gibson. TV’s grifter boom peaked back in 2022 with the likes of The Dropout and Inventing Anna, but star Kaitlyn Dever’s committed performance, combined with her momentum for her pivotal The Last of Us arc, could pull a nomination. It’s also a Black Mirror year. The techno-parable anthology series is intermittently an Emmy fave, and this season featured the likes of Paul Giamatti, Rashida Jones, Chris O’Dowd, and Cristin Milioti, all of whom could snag a nomination.

It is, objectively, a tough time to be repping the excellence of superhero TV. Marvel is looking to reverse a downward swing that many, including Kevin Feige, are blaming on the company investing too much story into its TV shows. Warner Bros. Discovery can’t blame the woes of the DC superhero saga on TV shows, but the Peacemaker spinoff from James Gunn’s Suicide Squad movie didn’t exactly light the world on fire. And yet excellence is exactly what HBO Max delivered with The Penguin, a twisty crime drama spun off from Matt Reeves’s The Batman film. Stars Colin Farrell, Cristin Milioti, and Deirdre O’Connell gave performances that bordered on the operatic, but the show’s grimy style, established by showrunner Lauren LeFranc, ensured they fit right in.

But Emmy voters have also tired of superhero TV in the last five years. We’re a long way from Watchmen’s 2020 victories (and that show was up to something far different from the corporate brand synergies of the MCU and DCEU, anyway). WandaVision got 23 nominations in 2021 but didn’t win any of the major awards it was up for that night. Subsequent MCU shows were shut out of the major categories, even seasons as well-regarded as Loki’s first. Agatha All Along will venture to reverse course on that trend, though I wouldn’t bet anything I wasn’t prepared to lose there. The Penguin stands a much better chance, if only because the Emmys have historically loved crime dramas. And by de-emphasizing the show’s superhero elements — nary a mention of Batman, and “Penguin” is merely a pejorative nickname bestowed on our mobster protagonist, Oz Cobb — Emmy voters will simply be asked to consider the show as a well-appointed crime drama.

Instead of making another movie that would undoubtedly have earned critical acclaim and an Oscar campaign, two-time Academy Award winner Alfonso Cuarón chose to make a limited series out of Renée Knight’s 2015 novel about a documentary filmmaker threatened with the reveal of a long-held secret. Cuarón cast another two-time Oscar winner, Cate Blanchett, in the lead role, and the folks at Apple TV+ had so much confidence in the show that they previewed it at major film festivals in Venice and Toronto.

Then it premiered in October and made zero impact. Anecdotally speaking, I haven’t heard anybody talk about it, either online or in person. The handful of people I know who actually saw it were TV critics and entertainment writers who treated watching it like eating vegetables.

Yet over the course of the last six months, Disclaimer has collected a significant handful of precursor nominations, including Golden Globe nominations for the series, Blanchett, and Kline. The same three plus an additional nod for supporting actress Leila George came from the Critics Choice Awards. Blanchett and Kline were nominated for SAG Awards. Cuarón picked up a Directors Guild nomination. These are the dutiful nominations you dole out to prestige talent and shows with big promotional budgets in order to fill out a category. Can a series that drummed up zero enthusiasm grab multiple Emmy nominations on reputation alone? The experts seem to think so. (Gold Derby has Blanchett, Kline, and Leslie Manville all lined up for nominations, as well as the series itself.)

In the last 13 years, FX produced 14 nominees in the Outstanding Limited Series category and three winners (the first season of Fargo and the American Crime Story seasons on O.J. Simpson and Gianni Versace). Heading into this year, the network had two remarkably strong contenders. The Michelle Williams–starring Dying for Sex, a comedy-drama from Kim Rosenstock and New Girl creator Liz Meriwether, is based on the podcast of the same name about a woman whose terminal diagnosis spurs a sexual awakening. Say Nothing, an Irish coming-of-age drama set within the ranks of the IRA during the Troubles, received exquisite reviews when the entire nine-episode series dropped via FX on Hulu in November.

While far from the production spectacle Shōgun was last year (a program that up until late in the season was being campaigned in Limited Series before transitioning to Drama), both Dying for Sex and Say Nothing present compelling Emmy cases: important subject matter, strong reviews, and in the former case, stars like Michelle Williams, Sissy Spacek, and Jenny Slate. And yet, to varying degrees, these shows have been on the far-back burner during campaign season. Williams — a former Emmy winner for Fosse/Verdon and easily the show’s best promotional weapon — has been absent from the traditional roundtable and actor-on-actor discussions. It may well be that FX is holding her back to keep her fresh to campaign post-nominations, but it’s not like THR or Variety reboots these roundtables for phase two. Slate, it should be noted, has been out there hustling for a much-deserved Supporting Actress nomination, but for a show that absolutely ranks among the year’s best, the drumbeat is distressingly quiet.

But quiet is better than silent, which is the case for Say Nothing. I asked Vulture critic Nicholas Quah, who enthusiastically reviewed the series back in November, whether he thought FX had erred by releasing all the episodes in a single binge. “Definitely,” he said. “Quality aside, Say Nothing was always going to be a tough sell for viewers who were already invested in Patrick Radden Keefe’s book or the story of the Troubles. It’s a dense nine-episode political drama that ping-pongs between time and features mostly unknown actors — Anthony Boyle, the biggest name on the call sheet, is at best on the cusp of fame. The burden fell on FX to market it well, and if we’ve learned anything about the binge-drop model, it’s that the only real way to make it work other than simply appearing on the front page of Netflix — a luxury FX obviously does not have — is to position the release as an event. Otherwise, the show vanishes.”

Quah told me that anecdotally, the show was unknown to viewers. “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve recommended the show to who (a) knew the book, (b) didn’t know there was an adaptation, and (c) ended up adoring the series when they checked it out.”

A weekly release certainly could have helped build word-of-mouth momentum, just like it did for the Emmy-winning Shōgun. “Say Nothing feels like exactly the kind of series that would have benefitted from a weekly drip,” Quah adds, “especially since a good deal of why you’d be drawn into the show is the strength of its performances.” Currently, the best odds for a Say Nothing nomination reside in the Lead Actress category with Lola Petticrew, who plays the real-life Dolours Price, though Boyle would also make for a richly deserving Supporting Actor nominee.

Alternatively, Apple TV+ had a word-of-mouth win with Presumed Innocent and its week-to-week release, but dropping such a strong series as early as possible in the Emmys window likely doomed it to outside chances in the race. Which is a shame, because while not exactly operating in rarefied air, Presumed Innocent was an engrossing legal drama featuring a ton of red-meat Emmy performances from the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, Ruth Negga, Peter Sarsgaard, Bill Camp, and O-T Fagbenle. (The former Handmaid’s Tale Emmy nominee was doing things with vocal delivery that Stanislavsky never dreamed of.)

Premiering in June 2024, Presumed Innocent has been out of sight longer than any of this year’s major contenders. And though I don’t relish the burgeoning trend of two dozen Emmy-bait shows dropping from mid-March to mid-May every year, it still feels like utter foolishness to put a show with that much potential out to pasture while voters are still catching up on last year’s contenders. Yes, The Bear does this every year, but The Bear is a continuing series, so new seasons do the work of promoting old seasons. We’re not getting a new season of the anthologized Presumed Innocent until presumably 2026, leaving the show stranded in the past as far as this year’s Emmys are concerned.