2013 EMMYS: Final Predictions, Hopes and Analysis

The 2013 Emmy awards will be given out today on live television (on CBS), providing recognition of the best achievements in television for the last year (since September 2012). The full list of Emmy nominations is here. Last year I analyzed the 2012 Emmy nominations and in the top 10 categories only 4 of the winners were what I had hoped. Last year one of my favorite shows, Homeland was a big winner and this year my favorite show Game of Thrones has a record 17 nominations.

Unlike my annual Oscar predictions, for the Emmys I usually just say which ones I wanted to win, not which ones I thought would win. However, this year I have decided to put in bold who I want to win and in italics who I think will win. We will know how well I did by 8pm PDT tonight! Openly gay Neil Patrick Harris is hosting the Emmy awards for the second time.

The interesting things to look for are whether comedy powerhouse Modern Family can continue its unbeaten string of winning this category or will voters finally acknowledge  the most watched comedy on television, The Big Bang Theory. Hip shows like Louie, Girls and Veep also have a (small) chance of upsetting the 3-time champ in this category.

The other thing to look for is whether a show that is not even broadcast on television, the Netflix show House of Cards starring 2-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey and an eye-popping $100 million production budget will be acknowledged, or will Homeland repeat its stunning success from last year, stopping the run of Mad Men. That show has prevented Breaking Bad from winning a Best Drama Series Emmy and since it is currently at its zenith in attention with its final episode set to air next week, will voters reward it, or wait until next year? I'm hoping that my favorite, HBO's Game of Thrones is recognized for its excellence this season.

Here are the nominations in the Top 10 categories for Drama and Comedy. Bold picks are ones I hope win and Italic picks are the ones I think will win. Bold italics is when they coincide :)

Outstanding Comedy Series:

"30 Rock" (NBC)

"The Big Bang Theory" (CBS)

"Girls" (HBO)

"Louie" (FX)

"Modern Family" (ABC)

"Veep" (HBO) 

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series:

Jason Bateman, "Arrested Development"

Jim Parsons, "The Big Bang Theory"

Matt LeBlanc, "Episodes"

Don Cheadle, "House of Lies"

Louis C.K., "Louie"

Alec Baldwin, "30 Rock"

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series:

Laura Dern, "Enlightened"

Lena Dunham, "Girls"

Edie Falco, "Nurse Jackie"

Amy Poehler, "Parks and Recreation"

Tina Fey, "30 Rock"

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, "Veep"

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series:

Adam Driver, "Girls"

Jesse Tyler Ferguson, "Modern Family"

Ed O'Neill, "Modern Family"

Ty Burrell, "Modern Family"

Bill Hader, "Saturday Night Live"

Tony Hale, "Veep"

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series:

Mayim Bialik, "The Big Bang Theory"

Jane Lynch, "Glee"

Sofia Vergara, "Modern Family"

Julie Bowen, "Modern Family"

Merritt Wever, "Nurse Jackie"

Jane Krakowski, "30 Rock"

Anna Chlumsky, "Veep"

Outstanding Drama Series:

"Breaking Bad" (AMC)

"Downton Abbey" (PBS)

"Game of Thrones" (HBO)

"Homeland" (Showtime)

"House of Cards" (Netflix)

"Mad Men" (AMC)

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series:

Bryan Cranston, "Breaking Bad"

Hugh Bonneville, "Downton Abbey"

Damian Lewis, "Homeland"

Kevin Spacey, "House of Cards"

Jon Hamm, "Mad Men"

Jeff Daniels, "The Newsroom"

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series:

Vera Farmiga, "Bates Motel"

Michelle Dockery, "Downton Abbey"

Claire Danes, "Homeland"

Robin Wright, "House of Cards"

Elisabeth Moss, "Mad Men"

Connie Britton, "Nashville"

Kerry Washington, "Scandal"

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series:

Bobby Cannavale, "Boardwalk Empire"

Jonathan Banks, "Breaking Bad"

Aaron Paul, "Breaking Bad"

Jim Carter, "Downton Abbey"

Peter Dinklage, "Game of Thrones"

Mandy Patinkin, "Homeland"

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series:

Anna Gunn, "Breaking Bad"

Maggie Smith, "Downton Abbey"

Emilia Clarke, "Game of Thrones"

Christine Baranski, "The Good Wife"

Morena Baccarin, "Homeland"

Christina Hendricks, "Mad Men"

WATCH: New Episodes of Homeland Starting 09/29/13

One of the best shows on television is Homeland. It won the Emmy award for Best Drama Series and is up for that award for its second season as well (competing against the third season of my favorite show Game of Thrones for that honor). Homeland will be returning for its third season on September 29th. It airs weekly on Showtime.

Homeland is actually third on my list of favorite shows last year, behind Game of Thrones and Walking Dead. I would say that both Walking Dead and Homeland had less successful seasons than the seasons before. For 2013, I would probably put The Good Wife ahead of Walking Dead with Game of Thrones as the clear favorite to keep the top spot. This trailer for the third season of Homeland looks encouraging though!

My Top 5 Favorite TV Shows of 2012

Arya Stark, one of the most popular characters
 in the Game of Thrones series

I have previously blogged about the five favorite books I read in 2012. When I am not reading, I watch television on my DVR (or go to see movies). Now that the Super Bowl is over, the 2013 television season

The shows that I made sure my DVR recorded every week in 2013 and which I often watched live were some of my favorite television shows from 2012:

5. The Good Wife. I first found about the The Good Wife when Archie Panjabi won the Best Supporting Actress in Television Drama Series at the Emmys in 2010. She was so striking that I thought "I should really check out that show," especially since I was shocked she had beaten out the person I thought was the clear frontrunner, Rose Byrne from Damages. I knew that the show starred an alum from ER, Julianna Margulies but I think I saw it as a cheap knock-off of the Eliot Spitzer scandal. (The show follows the travails of the wife of a politician who admits to an affair and the "good wife" stands by her man.) I have actually never seen the first season of the show but I got hooked towards the beginning of the second season and have not looked back. It basically is an update of David E. Kelley's LA Law and The Practice with less sex, but more interesting cases, and with local politics thrown in. Margulies is very good and bring a lot more nuanced to her role as "the good wife," as does Christine Baranski in a dramatic role. They used to have Michael Boatman in a more prominent role but now the show's cast is almost overwhelmingly white but I'm still hooked. Besides, both Josh Charles and Matt Czuchry bring enough "cute white boy" energy to keep the casual gay fan engaged. 

4. Modern Family. This is simply the best comedy on television, taking the overdone format of a sitcom about simple domestic living and turning it on its head by trying to represent as much family diversity as possible. So, there's the family with the hot Latina trophy wife Gloria (Sofia Vergara) and her pedantic son Manny living with the rich and grumpy curmudgeon (Ed O'Neill) Jay; the very gay couple Cameron (overweight,dramatic & queeny camer Eric Stonestreet) and Mitchell (red-headed, dramatic & queeny Jesse Tyler Ferguson) raising their adopted Asian girl toddler Lily; and the "typical" nuclear family consisting of a pretty, neurotic mom (Julie Bowen) Claire and a childlike father (Ty Burrell) Phil with their three kids Haley, Alex and Luke. It should be noted that despite the astonishingly good writing and uniformly good acting (the entire adult cast regularly gets nominated and Best Supporting Actor has been won by a Modern Family castmember every year it has been on television) this is another show which does not have a regular African-American castmember, even though the producers have clearly tried hard to represent the wide spectrum of diversity present in America. One extra thrill for me while watching the show is knowing that is filmed in my home town of Los Angeles and from time to time recognizing some of the locations that the characters are in. The unapologetic portrayal of a "real" gay couple is one of the clear highlights of the show, but Burrell, Bowen, Stonestreet are also comedic actors performing at the top of their game. 

3. Homeland. The first season of Homeland may be the best first season of a television drama, ever. (Although I think the producers of The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and Lost may quibble, and I would add the first season of 24, Alias and Six Feet Under to that list. Homeland has the DNA of 24 through producer Howard Gordon but stars Claire Danes and Damian Lewis as the co-leads. Both of these actors are infinitely superior to Keifer Sutherland, but when you throw in Mandy Patinkin there's no contest. But the key to Homeland is its writing, and in the first season the writers conceived and executed a perfectly timed, insanely suspenseful sequence of realistic events involving lifelike, complicated characters that it was simply breath-taking to behold. Although they were unable to maintain that high level of excellence through the second season (which also happened in 2012), even a slightly flawed Homeland was still better than 99% of everything else on television. 

2. Walking Dead. I had heard about this new show about the zombie apocalypse based on a series of popular comics graphic novels airing on cable but since I don't read graphic novels I was somewhat uninterested in watching it. I'm not sure what convinced me to watch the first episode, but I happened to run into it a few weeks before the debut of the now-infamous second season and was immediately hooked after seeing the pilot and devoured the entirety of the rest of the first season (only 5 1-hour episodes) in the next twenty four hours. The brilliance of Walking Dead is that it works on many levels. If you are interested in blood-spattering gore and violent situations then you will get more than your fill of both, basically in every episode. If you are interested (like I am) in emotionally-laden, nuanced situations that complex characters have to navigate in a dangerous, difficult world extrapolated from our own then you will also see a lot of that in every episode. The show is based on very popular material from another medium from which it is slightly deviating (with the approval and participation of its creator Robert Kirkman) that brings along another whole fan base. It's this combination, plus the ruthless policy of the producers (enacted to maximal effect multiple times already) that literally no character is safe from extinction that makes and made Walking Dead the most watched show by the most coveted audience (18-49) on cable television.

1. Game of Thrones. The top two shows on my list are similar, in that they are genre pieces of fiction (Walking Dead is based on a horror-speculative fiction graphic novel while Game of Thrones is based on one of the best selling swords-and-sorcery fantasy series of all time) that also have participation from the creator of the original work. Game of Thrones airs on HBO which means that both the budget of the show is much larger (rumored to be on the order of 50-60 million dollars per season, or more than $5 million per episode) while its audience is relatively smaller (Walking Dead averaged about 5 million and 7 million viewers per episode in its first two seasons while Game of Thrones averaged about 2.5 million and 3.5 million in its first two seasons). Because it's on premium cable, Game of Thrones is also able to be more sexually explicit than its rivals (this also applies to Homeland which airs on Showtime) and it uses (some would say abuses) this ability, primarily by including lots of female nudity. For me, the reason why the show is a must-see is that I am a fan of the underlying source material, and I am curious to see how the producers are going to bring the books to life on screen. But, the reason why I am a fan of that material (as well as the show) is that it is fascinating political drama, based around compelling characters that we have come to care about, put in harrowing situations. One could really argue that the television adaption is taking an already great series of books and improving on them by making use of the medium to highlight and create nuances and meanings which may have either escaped notice while reading (or may not have even been there in the original text!) And the exciting thing about the series is that although we know what happens in the first several seasons of the show because they are based on the first few books, George R.R. Martin hasn't finished writing the books yet so no one knows the ultimate resolution of any of the fates of the characters. Similar to Walking Dead, Martin is also fairly ruthless about his characters and many, many heads roll, even of characters that the audience loves (and some that they hate). Another key feature that separates Game of Thrones from its rivals is the sheer magnitude of the cast of characters. They are numerous and multifarious, providing different kinds of viewers with people that they can cheer for and root against. My favorite is Tyrion Lannister (played to Emmy award-winning perfection by Peter Dinklage) who happens to be a "bad guy" in the series, but he is also (one of) the smartest person in the books, while also being an amoral, brutally scarred dwarf scion of the richest family in the Kingdom. Even if you have not read the books (as my Other Half has not) you can still quite enjoy the series, although I think if you have read the books it gives one an extra frisson of pleasure.

Honorable Mentions
The Big Bang Theory, True Blood, Happy Endings, Boss and Alphas. Guilty pleasure: Scandal.

2013 OSCARS: Golden Globe Winners

The Golden Globe awards, often an important (although not very predictive) precursor to the Academy Awards, were presented in Los Angeles on Sunday evening. The winners are:

Best Picture: Argo
Best Director: Ben Affleck, Argo
Best Actress: Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Best Picture, Musical/Comedy: Les Miserables
Best Foreign Language Film: Amour
Best Actress Comedy: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Best Actor Musical: Hugh Jackman, Les Miserables
Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
Best Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained
Best Original Score: Mychael Danna, Life of Pi
Best Song: Adele, Skyfall
Best Animated Feature: Brave

There were also television awards given out and Homeland continued its domination of the awards for its stellar first season by winning Best Actor, Actress and Best Drama (the same awards it won at the Emmys 4 months ago).

Jodie Foster, 50, was given a prestigious career award and revealed an important secret: she's single! (She also very explicitly came out as a lesbian, acknowledging the existence of her ex-life partner Sidney (who, oddly was not shown on television although the two boys they raised together were).

Walking Dead Returns Tonight for Season 3!

It seems like it's been quite a long time since the stunning Season 2 finale (on Sunday March 18th) of one of the most emotionally harrowing shows on television, the AMC's zombie drama The Walking Dead. There was a trailer for Season 3 released over the summer but i have kept myself relatively spoiler free.

With The Walking Dead, Emmy-award winning Homeland and The Good Wife all airing on Sundays one after the other it's a good reason to stay in before the week starts. Set your DVR!

2012 EMMYS: The Winners!

Tonight the 2012 Emmy Awards were given out. I only correctly predicted 4 of 10 of the top categories in drama and comedy in my previous analysis of the nominations, although I did get the two biggest awards of the night right, which was the wins for ABC's Modern Family and Showtime's Homeland for Best Comedy Series and Best Drama Series, respectively.

There were two upsets in the Lead Actor and Lead Actress Comedy Series, with Jon Cryer winning instead of openly gay 2-time Emmy-winner Jim Parson and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss winning for the wretched series Veep instead of either Tina Fey or Amy Poehler.

I was very psyched to see the accolades for  Homeland, which I caught on demand last Spring and quickly burned through watching 4 or 5 episodes in one weekend prior to the season finale in May. Claire Danes and Damian Lewis are simply amazing in this tautly written and brilliantly acted series which is a remake of an Israeli television series about a returning soldier (Lewis) who a mentally ill intelligence officer (Danes) thinks may have been turned into an enemy weapon.

The second season of Homeland starts next Sunday. Check it out!

Here are the results of the Top 10 Emmy awards in the Drama and Comedy categories.

Outstanding Comedy Series

• "Curb Your Enthusiasm"
• "Girls"
• "The Big Bang Theory"
• "Modern Family" (WINNER!)
• "Veep"
• "30 Rock"

Lead Actress in a Comedy Series

• Zooey Deschanel - "New Girl"
• Lena Dunham - "Girls"
• Edie Falco - "Nurse Jackie"
• Tina Fey - "30 Rock"
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus "Veep" (WINNER!)
• Melissa McCarthy - "Mike & Molly"
• Amy Poehler - "Parks and Recreation

Lead Actor in a Comedy Series

• Alec Baldwin - "30 Rock"
• Louis CK - "Louie"
• Larry David - "Curb Your Enthusiasm"
• Jim Parsons - "The Big Bang Theory"
• Jon Cryer - "Two and a Half Men" (WINNER!)
• Don Cheadle - "House of Lies"

Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series

• Mayim Bialik - "The Big Bang Theory"
• Julie Bowen - "Modern Family" (WINNER!)
• Merritt Wever - "Nurse Jackie"
• Sofia Vergara - "Modern Family"
• Kristen Wiig - "Saturday Night Live"
• Kathryn Joosten - "Desperate Housewives"

Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series

• Ty Burrell - "Modern Family"
• Jesse Tyler Ferguson - "Modern Family"
• Ed O'Neil - "Modern Family"
• Eric Stonestreet - "Modern Family" (WINNER!)
• Max Greenfield - "New Girl"
• Bill Hader - "Saturday Night Live"

Outstanding Drama Series

• "Boardwalk Empire"
• "Breaking Bad"
• "Downton Abbey"
• "Game of Thrones"
• "Homeland" (WINNER!)
• "Mad Men"

Lead Actress in a Drama Series

• Kathy Bates - "Harry's Law"
• Claire Danes - "Homeland" (WINNER!)
• Glenn Close - "Damages"
• Julianna Margulies - "The Good Wife"
• Michelle Dockery - "Downton Abbey"
• Elizabeth Moss - "Mad Men"

Lead Actor in a Drama Series

• Steve Buscemi - "Boardwalk Empire"
• Bryan Cranston - "Breaking Bad"
• Michael C. Hall - "Dexter"
• Jon Hamm - "Mad Men"
• Hugh Bonneville - "Downton Abbey"
• Damian Lewis - "Homeland" (WINNER!)

Supporting Actress in a Drama Series

• Archie Punjabi - "The Good Wife"
• Anna Gunn - "Breaking Bad"
• Maggie Smith - "Downton Abbey" (WINNER!)
• Joanne Froggatt - "Downton Abbey"
• Christina Hendricks - "Mad Men"
• Christine Baranski - "The Good Wife"

Supporting Actor in a Drama Series

• Aaron Paul - "Breaking Bad" (WINNER!)
• Giancaro Esposito - "Breaking Bad"
• Brendan Coyle - "Downton Abbey"
• Jim Carter - "Downton Abbey"
• Jared Harris - "Mad Men"
• Peter Dinklage - "Game of Thrones"