114 EMMY
Academy News
71st Emmys: The Noms
Two hosts who’ve got
game set the stage for
Thrones glory.W
hen they took
the stage on the
morning of July 16
to announce the
Emmy nominations, comic actors
Ken Jeong and D’Arcy Carden had
some good-natured fun with their
industry colleagues, surely glued
to screens everywhere, waiting to
hear if they’d scored a nom.
“Imagine you’re Sterling K.
Brown,” began Carden, who is
known to viewers from HBO’s
Barry and NBC’s The Good Place.
“You woke up early this morning,
made your coffee, you’re in your
beautiful dine-in kitchen....”
“Whoa, whoa!” interruptedJeong, a judge on Fox’s The Masked
Singer, the star of his own Netflix
special and a popular cast member
of Crazy Rich Asians. “Do you think
he has one of those?”
“Sterling K.? Absolutely! And
now all he wants to hear from us —
as soon as possible — is this year’s
Emmy nominees.”
”Right. The last thing Sterling
wants to hear is two strangers
conjecturing about the layout of his
fancy dine-in kitchen.”
“Or really any comedy bit at all.
So we should get to it!”
“You’re totally right, D’Arcy.”
“And the nominees are...”
Jeong intoned, then cut himself
off. “You know,” he said, resuming
the bit, “those are the only words
he or anyone else watching wants
to hear.”
“That’s right!” Carden agreed.“We have such an honor. We
have the most talented people in
television all angrily hoping that
we will wrap this up. I can almost
feel them screaming at their TVs
right now.”
When they got around to the
nominees in twelve key categories,
Brown was among the lucky
few. He earned an Emmy nod as
lead actor in a drama series for
NBC’s This Is Us (it was his third
for that role; he won in 2017). Also
nominated in the category were
Brown’s costar, Milo Ventimiglia, as
well as Jason Bateman of Netflix’s
Ozark, Kit Harington of HBO’s Game
of Thrones, Bob Odenkirk of AMC’s
Better Call Saul; and Billy Porter of
FX’s Pose.
In just fifteen minutes, the
ceremony — streamed live
from the Television Academy’sWolf Theatre over Emmys.com,
Facebook, YouTube and, for the first
time, Twitter — was over. But it was
already clear to industry members
skimming the full nominations
list online that the glory belonged
to Game of Thrones. In its final
season, the drama captured
thirty-two noms, the most for any
program in a single season, beating
the previous record of twenty-
seven, set by NYPD Blue a quarter-
century ago.
Following GoT, the most-
honored programs were Amazon’s
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, with
twenty nominations; HBO’s
Chernobyl, nineteen; NBC’s
Saturday Night Live, eighteen;
Barry, seventeen; FX’s Fosse/
Verdon, seventeen; and Netflix’s
When They See Us, sixteen.
Not surprisingly, HBO retookPHOTOGRAPHS BY INVISIONKen Jeong and D’Arcy Carden at the Emmy nominations announcement