Here’s the Emmy Rule That Makes Voters Look Lazy

A version of this story about Emmy voting first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

For the most part, voting for showbiz nominations is pretty simple. If you’re voting in a category in which there will be five nominations, you typically have five slots to fill on your ballot; if there are 10, you have 10 slots. But the Emmys haven’t worked that way since 2017, when the Television Academy added a simple sentence with complicated reverberations: “Vote for all entries in this category that you have seen and feel are worthy of a nomination.”

That means that if a member of the Television Academy’s acting peer group is casting a ballot in, say, the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series category, they could vote for as many of the 434 eligible actors as they wanted, scrolling through all 55 pages of the ballot and clicking every time they saw an actor — or, crucially, a show — they liked.

The idea, no doubt, was to help voters who might throw up their hands at the idea of narrowing hundreds of eligible contenders to a single handful. But by doing away with limits, you’re telling voters that they don’t have to be choosy or worry about spreading the wealth — that they can vote for all the actors on their favorite shows and still have slots left over for other performances they may have liked.

And when some shows are inevitably more popular and more widely viewed than others, and all the actors on those shows are getting votes, the system tilts the playing field in favor of the biggest shows and all but invites them to grab an inordinate share of the nominations.

“The (Motion Picture) Academy’s proportional system give the most value to your top choices – the ones that reflect your best insights and knowledge,” said Rob Richie, president and CEO of FairVote, a nonpartisan research organization that advocates for the type of ranked-choice voting system used for the Oscars. “The Emmys’ system gives equal weight to every pick you make, which give more support to ‘safe’ choices that have more name recognition.”

That’s exactly what’s been happening in recent years, and it certainly happened this year. In the Outstanding Supporting Actor and Actress in a Limited Series categories, for example, “The White Lotus” and “Dopesick” took a remarkable 13 of the 14 nominations, leaving Seth Rogen from “Pam & Tommy” as the only one nominee from any other show. Eight of the 10 eligible “White Lotus” actors and five of the seven contending “Dopesick” ones were nominated, while 83 other shows with 403 eligible performers were shut out.  

“Succession,” meanwhile, had three of the six nominees in the Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series category, four of the six in guest actor and an additional five in the two supporting categories, landing 14 total acting noms to break a 46-year-old record that had been set by “Rich Man, Poor Man” (and tied by “Roots”) at a time when the Emmys had additional acting categories that have since been discontinued.

This kind of consolidation is very different from what we saw in 2016, the year before the voting change was made. Even with shows like “Veep,” “House of Cards,” “Game of Thrones” and “SNL” landing more than five nominations each, that year saw 46 different series (17 dramas, 19 comedies and 10 limited series) nominated for acting, with each show averaging almost exactly two nominations.

The previous year, 52 programs divided the 97 nominations, less than two per show.

This year, by contrast, the nominations were split among only 33 programs, which averaged more than three nominations per show. In the drama and comedy series categories, each show averaged 3.8 acting nominations – and the consolidation was particularly overpowering in the drama categories, where nine shows grabbed all 40 nominations. There wasn’t a single drama series that didn’t receive multiple nominations, ranging from two for “Killing Eve,” “Yellowjackets” and “Better Call Saul” to the record 14 for “Succession.”

“The distorted outcomes in the Emmy nominations this year underscore the difference between fair rules that elevate everyone’s voice and unfair rules that exaggerate the power of the largest group of voters,” Richie told TheWrap, comparing the Emmy process once again to the Oscar one. “For decades, Oscar nominees in most categories have been selected with the proportional form of ranked choice voting that enables as many Academy voters as possible to help nominate one of their top choices. That system seeks to realize the vision of one person, one effective vote.

“In contrast, the Emmy now give everyone as many votes as they want. As a result, some voters help advance a slew of nominees in one category, while many voters (are) entirely shut out.”

So as the number of eligible series is exploding, the number that receives nominations, particularly in the marquee categories, is contracting. And while it’s easy to blame the voters for that, as I have done in the past, it may not be entirely fair. If someone was given only five choices on his or her nominating ballot, wouldn’t they try to spread the wealth rather than voting for everybody on “Ted Lasso” or “Succession?” I suspect they would. It looks as if voters are responding to the vast television landscape by narrowing their focus, when in fact it might just be that the system is guaranteed to overload the slate of nominees with contenders from the shows that everybody has seen.

To put it bluntly, the Television Academy rule is making its voters look lazier and more narrow-minded than they might be. If you look at the trend since 2017, it’s inescapable that allowing people to vote for everything has damaged the breadth of the nominations and hurt the image of those who vote for them. The rule has outlived its usefulness, assuming it ever had any.

Read more from the Down to the Wire: Drama issue here.