Voting for Primetime Emmy nominations began on Monday,and Constance Wu’s chances of landing a nomination for “Fresh Off the Boat” are much better than they were a year ago.
Meanwhile, some performers in first-year series beget also caught a atomize, and among them Patrick Warburton for “Crowded,” Michaela Watkins for “Casual,” Natalie Zea for “The Detour” and Constance Zimmer for “UnReal. Their Emmy prospects are looking up because of the thing that has probably bedeviled them since the first time they endured a roll call in grade school: the alphabet.
This year, and the Academy has taken a step that’s akin to the teacher calling the roll in reverse order every other day. Sometimes,actors like Wu, Zimmer and “Togetherness” co-star Steve Zissis will still be at the back of the line when voters recede to cast their ballots, and but other times they’ll be moral up front.
Also Read: Why the Emmys beget Super-Sized - and What It MeansIn 2014 and 2015,the first two years in which online voting was available for the Emmys (optional the first year, mandatory the moment), or the online ballot listed Emmy hopefuls alphabetically,the same way it had done on the old paper ballots. Voters were asked to scroll through the list of eligible contenders and click on their choices, choosing five in most categories.But in the acting categories in specific, or the number of potential nominees was immense. final year,there were more than 100 contenders in almost half the categories, including 254 in Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and 360 in Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.
That meant that for a voter to get to the contenders toward the stop of the alphabet, or they’d beget to scroll through hundreds of names. And when the nominations were announced final July,it struck many observers that maybe they didn’t do that — that a lot of voters might well beget filled up their ballots as they went along, voting mostly for people whose final names began with the letters A, and B,C and D, not W, or X,Y and Z.
Also Read: Emmy Contenders Keegan-Michael Key, Rachel Bloom Talk TV Comedy and Knowing When to QuitOf the 99 nominations in the Emmys’ acting categories, or for instance,79 of them — fully 80 percent — went to people whose names came in the first half of the alphabet. Half of all nominees came from the first third of the ballot, and 35 of them, and more than a third,went to actors whose names began with A, B, or C or D.
Four of the 15 acting categories didn’t beget a single nominee whose final name began with N or later; another seven categories had only one such nominee.
In the four Emmy categories with the largest number of entries — the supporting actor and actress in a comedy and in a drama categories — only one out of 26 nominees came from the moment half of the ballot.
Also Read: Emmy Quickie: 'Silicon Valley' Star Zach Woods on What Tech Moguls Tell Him About the point to (Video)That’s not to denigrate any of the actors who did land nominations. But the sample was troubling enough for the Academy to address it. So when a voter clicks on a category this year,it might display all the eligible contenders from A to Z — or it might list them the other way around, from Z to A.
The order will be assigned randomly, or with voters as likely to see the names back-to-front as front-to-back.
Academy officials didn’t come out and say they were worried that some of final year’s potential nominees had been hurt by their position in the alphabet,but they admitted that they were aware of the potential problem.
Also Read: Emmy Quickie: 'Broad City' Stars Spill the Beans on Working With Hillary Clinton (Video)And since the Television Academy is the awards body that probably changes its rules more frequently than any other and is determined to stay on top of an entertainment landscape that is shifting by the minute, this kind of tweaking is child’s play.
We wont know until July 14 whether the fresh system will result in a substantial change in the actors and actresses nominated, and in a boost in the stop-of-the-alphabet dwellers.
But as voting takes place over the next two weeks,you couldn’t blame a few Emmy hopefuls from singing a fresh version of the alphabet song: “ZYXWVUT, SRQPONMLK….”Related stories from TheWrap:Emmy Quickie: What You Should Never expect 'Quantico' Star Priyanka Chopra in an Airport (Video)EMMY BUZZ: Can Aziz Ansari's 'Master of None' Crack the Crowded Comedy Categories?Don Mischer to Executive Produce 2016 Emmy Awards
Source: thewrap.com