Every year, more than 27,000 members of the Television Academy — actors and editors, showrunners and composers, the people who actually make television — sit down with their ballots and decide who walks away with an Emmy. And every year, almost none of them will tell us, on the record, what they really think. So, like we do with Oscar voters, we reached out to a few of them ourselves.
In the final days of voting for the 78th Emmy Awards, Variety spoke with dozens of Academy members across the organization’s 31 professional peer groups — the specialty divisions that sort the membership by craft, from performers to picture editors — and promised each of them anonymity in exchange for total candor. What we saw was a very small snapshot of where the race could go when awards are handed out across the first two weekends in September. Every voter was also asked the same four questions off the ballot — their biggest snub, the most overspent FYC campaign, the network or streamer having the best season and the one win that would actually move the business.
Their answers close each entry. In the categories deemed “area awards” — hosted nonfiction and variety series — voters have the opportunity to select multiple nominees by answering a simple question: Does this show deserve an Emmy? Interestingly, not one voter Variety spoke with checked “Yes” for every nominee, and only four of those surveyed selected more than one.
That strongly suggests voters aren’t viewing these categories as an opportunity to spread the wealth, but rather as a traditional “may the best show win” competition. Ballots have been edited for length and, where necessary, to protect identities. The opinions are their own.
They’re contradictory, occasionally indefensible and, at least for the purposes of this article, the only ones that matter. Notably, and vitally important to point out, 10 ballots are not an official presidential poll. They are barely even a focus group.
But what you get is a window into a small, unscientific and anecdotal sample of a voting body of more than 20,000 industry professionals. Nobody should mistake this for a forecast, and the voters themselves would be the first to tell you as well (except for one, anyway). What these conversations reveal, year after year, is how little of the field any one voter has actually seen.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
