The nominees in the outstanding limited or anthology series category at the 2021 Emmys overflow with excellence. Any of the shows vying for the win at this year’s ceremony, set to air Sunday, Sept. 19, on CBS, would be an easy winner in a different year.
Those nominees — HBO’s “I May Destroy You” and “Mare of Easttown,” Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit,” Amazon Prime Video’s “The Underground Railroad,” and the Marvel Studios show “WandaVision” — reflect the benefits from the recent mass migration of big-screen talent toward television and streaming projects.
For the first time, the limited series Emmy appears to have supplanted the best picture Academy Award as the truest arbiter of onscreen achievement.
“Projects that once would have been mid-level movies are now becoming limited series,” noted Eric Deggans, NPR television critic and an Emmys prognosticator on the awards site Gold Derby. “Ten or 15 years ago, ‘Mare of Easttown’ would have been a movie with a $50 (million) or $60 million budget.”
And why not? It’s a murder mystery starring Oscar winner Kate Winslet. “Gambit,” the tale of an orphan turned chess phenom (played by Anya Taylor-Joy), also could have been a movie — it shares a 1960s setting and an odds-defying protagonist full of mid-20th-century pluck with “Forrest Gump.”
“But Hollywood does not make those kinds of movies anymore,” Deggans told The Chronicle, and especially not the ones that star women.
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While a loss for film fans, this female-led limited series trend produced three standout shows in the highly competitive category: “Mare,” “Gambit” and “I May Destroy You,” British writer-director-actress Michaela Coel’s genre-defying exploration of a rape and its aftermath.
These shows astonished, endeared and inspired a sense of personal duty for TV lovers to spread the word that there were actual revelations sitting within the mountains of content that premiered during the first year of the pandemic.
“Gambit,” “Mare” and “I May Destroy You” also occupy the top three spots on many prognosticators’ lists of shows most likely to win the Emmy. “WandaVision” is also in the mix, but it is too stylized to put your arms around the way you can the other three, and too heavily marketed by Disney and all your boy cousins to qualify as a discovery.
Winslet gives a career-best performance as Mare Sheehan, a Pennsylvania detective working a big case while mourning her late son. Mare’s resting state is weariness, but Winslet, while working within a contained expression range, adds grief, affection, frustration, pride and a hopefulness that’s rare in her town full of Carhartt shackets and grim prospects.
Winslet makes you forget she’s English, that she rose to fame as Rose DeWitt Bukater in “Titanic” or ever pronounced “water” any way other than Delaware County’s signature wudder. She’s surrounded by talent — fellow acting Emmy nominees Jean Smart, Evan Peters and Julianne Nicholson — but the show wouldn’t work without her, just as Mare’s town would collapse if she ever upped and moved to Philadelphia.
Taylor-Joy’s watchful reserve offers an easy way into the story of “Gambit,” as the unstoppable Beth Harmon navigates the earthly hurdles that impede her otherworldly brilliance. We are all observers here. But it’s only Beth taking the emotional hits, and she does feel them, in the manner of someone denied the space to express emotion as a child.
Her performance is a big part of the show’s appeal, but so are the ’60s clothes, music and settings that are swingin’ without being “Mad Men” fetishistic, along with show co-creator Scott Frank’s ability to keep finding ways to make chess visually exciting.
In terms of visual innovation however, “Mare” and “Gambit” are the Camrys to “I May Destroy You’s” Model Y Tesla. Coel uses flashbacks, woozy camera work and snippets of scenes that change shape when revisited, to slowly reveal what her character, London writer Arabella Essiedu, can piece together about the night she was drugged and assaulted.
Coel is achingly sympathetic as Arabella turns amateur sleuth to try to regain ownership of her own story, her trauma coming out sideways as the narrative moves forward and back.
“I May Destroy You” views the world with a wider lens than “Mare” or “Gambit,” examining matters of racial, cultural and sexual identity while sometimes giving supporting characters the stage. Coel’s artful blend of absurdity and gravity also makes her show the most fun of the three, despite its delicate and at-times triggering subject matter.
“The show’s dark humor refuses both sympathetic condescension and the violence of spectacle,” Rizvana Bradley, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of film and media studies, noted over email about “I May Destroy You.”
That humor helps maintain space for the “complexity of characters whose experiences of racial and sexual trauma cannot be readily reduced to familiar tropes, scenes or slogans,” Bradley added.
Coel’s is the only truly breathtaking show in the top three, and yet it often runs third on Emmy experts’ prediction lists. Timing might be part of it, Deggans said. “I May Destroy You” premiered in June 2020, long before the arrival of “Gambit” in October and the premiere of “Mare” in April of this year.
“When you are trying to judge how the academy feels about (a show), you look at the star power, how successful it was, the critical consensus on it, and how recent it is,” Deggans said. “Is it top of mind for people?”
All three shows were huge critical hits, but “Mare” carries the only real star power. It also drew more viewers than Coel’s show. “Gambit” probably did, too: Netflix reported last fall it was its most-watched limited series ever.
“People remember the seismic effect of that series because it was one of those pandemic shows that blew up out of nowhere,” Deggans said of “Gambit.” “If Emmy voters are going to award a show that has been around a while, it is probably going to be ‘Queen’s Gambit.’ I’m also cynical about the role that race will play in this, and wonder if the Emmy voters will value shows that have Black leads as much as they will those other two.”
Voters gave “Watchmen,” which had a Black lead in Regina King, the limited series Emmy in 2020. But that win seemed predestined, whereas one for “I May Destroy You” does not. “Watchmen” was the most nominated show of the year, with 26 nods. “The academy had already said, ‘We love this show,’ ” Deggans said, making its win in the limited series category easier to predict. The nine total nominations for “I May Destroy You” do not indicate the same massive popularity among Emmy voters.
Deggans is among the few Gold Derby experts who placed Coel’s show at the top of his predictions list. But he might change his vote closer to the ceremony to “Mare” or “Gambit.”
“I tend to initially put shows at the top of my list that I want to be in the conversation, because so many people from the industry look at what critics say on that site,” Deggans said. He wanted to make sure “I May Destroy You,” which was totally snubbed by the Golden Globes, was part of that conversation.
But is Coel’s show his actual favorite in the category? Deggans qualified his answer a bit, noting that other great shows were excluded from the category, but ultimately said yes for “the originality of the voice,” among other factors.
Such confirmation matters in this Emmy year when we took the best shows personally.
73rd Primetime Emmy Awards: Hosted by Cedric the Entertainer. 5 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 19, on CBS. Live stream available on Paramount+.