2023 Emmys: Most of What You Need To Know About the Emmy Awards

If you’re reading this article, then voting for the 2023 Emmy Awards — its 75th edition — is underway.

But the Emmys aren’t until September, you may ask. Why are they voting so early? Well, dear reader, gather ’round and let me explain how you win an Emmy Award courtesy of information cobbled together from my aging brain and information readily available on the Emmys website.

The Television Academy first started in 1946, orchestrated by Syd Cassyd and five charter members. Today, there are over 17,000 members of the Television Academy, 16,587 of whom wake up every day saying, “There’s just too much goddamn TV to watch.” They then vote for Succession in every category. The original intent of the Television Academy was not to give yearly golden statues but to “help industry professionals develop the art and science of television.” Quite a lofty undertaking for a medium not fully respected until several decades later. The actual Emmy Awards show wouldn’t happen until 1949 at the Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles. There were only five categories at the first show, and perhaps intentionally, it only cost $5 to attend. Today, there are so many categories that the ceremony needed to be split into two presentations: the Creative Arts Emmy Awards and the Primetime Emmy Awards. The last count totaled 119 Emmy Awards. Sadly, I do not have an Emmy Award despite 119 categories given out yearly.

Where does the name “Emmy” come from you may ask? Well, it comes from a nickname, “immy,” given to the image-orthicon camera tube instrumental in the technical development of television. And that’s why they’ll never be as good as the Oscars. I mean, didn’t the statue resemble someone’s Auntie Emma somewhere? No? It came from something you’d find at a Radio Shack?

And we move on…

By the way, it took 48 shots before someone settled on the winged woman holding an atom that we all know and love today. Louis McManus designed the statue to resemble his wife. The wings represented art (and could be used as a very deadly weapon), and the atom represents science, harkening us back to three paragraphs ago when I mentioned the original charter of the Television Academy was to honor the “art and science of television.”

SYNERGY!

The first recipient of an Emmy Award was ventriloquist and KTLA personality Shirley Dinsdale. She hosted a 15-minute children’s show with her terrifying doll “Judy Splinters.” She actually won the Emmy for Outstanding Television Personality while she was a student at UCLA. When I was a student at North Carolina State University, I once interviewed Ben Stiller and asked him if he routinely looked for projects with his then girlfriend Jeanne Tripplehorn. I’ve never been able to forget that or speak to him again since. Not that I’ve had a great deal of opportunities, but if he called, I would not answer.

That said, I never harnessed the soul of a dead child and paraded it around on television. Despite popular opinion, the photo to your right is not an image of Dinsdale trying to choke Judy Splinters on national television, which surely would have jeopardized her Emmy trajectory. Seriously though, she seemed like a great woman and brought a lot of happiness to children everywhere. Good for her!

VOTING

This is where it gets a little tricky, folks. First, in order to be eligible for an Emmy Award, a performer, program, or individual achievement must be submitted. Shocking, I know, that there are no write-in opportunities for Emmy Awards. See: Clarence doesn’t have an Emmy Award because no one would ever put him on television. Once all submissions are in and placed in the appropriate categories, then voting begins. Category placement isn’t nearly as simple as you may think. Sometimes, a series like FX’s The Bear will call itself a comedy because it’s short and doesn’t contain a single joke within the entire first season, and the Television Academy will say, “Sounds good! Laughed my ass off!” Sometimes, a series like Schmigadoon! will get tricky and try to submit itself in the same category as Saturday Night Live because the competition in Comedy Series feels a little too thick and most television watchers don’t have a spare minute for a fully scripted and carefully choreographed series that sends up / lovingly references musicals of the 1970s. In cases like that, the Television Academy will fully call you out on your shit and put you in the corner.

Ok, so today, voting members of the Television Academy receive access to the hundreds of nominees for the categories in which they’re allowed to vote. These nominees are also bundled together in PDFs and released on Emmys.com for Emmy nerds like me to obsess over looking for surprising omissions or an overabundance of submissions in a particular category. All members of the Television Academy have the opportunity to vote on 14 categories, basically the series races such as Drama Series, Comedy Series, Limited or Anthology Series, the Television Movies You Didn’t Actually Watch, and so forth. Performance categories are voted on by their performer peer groups. The rest of the categories are voted on by peer groups recognizing individual achievements such as directing and writing.

The best thing about the recent Emmy Awards is that they’ve allowed the number of nominees per category to be a variable number. That means, for example, the number of Supporting Actress in a Drama Series nominees depends entirely on how many eligible performances were submitted for the category. Oddly enough, the Comedy and Drama Series races are fixed at 8 nominees. Sometimes, I wish there were less. Quantity does not always guarantee quality, my friends.

Ernst & Young tabulates the nominees out of this Phase 1 voting period because PricewaterhouseCoopers was too busy taking selfies with celebs to do it. I kid. I kid. (See the 2017 Oscars for why that’s funny.) Once the nominees are determined, they will be announced in a televised event on July 12. Then, we wait until Phase 2 begins. Before the final round voting happens, the Television Academy realizes that no one can really watch all of the television available in order to appropriately judge the winners. No one really talks about that in first round voting, so it clearly must not be a problem until the shows have been whittled down and things get real. That’s when nominees in the performance and individual achievement categories choose their best work. For series, the producers select a specific number of episodes that best represent their work. For example, in the Comedy and Drama races, producers select six episodes. For animated series, producers select a single episode. And for limited series, they want voters to watch the whole damn thing.

Selected episodes are then loaded into the Emmy’s online viewing platform, originated in 2015 and reinforced in 2020 when DVD mailers were discontinued to clearly disenfranchise my parents. It does open the voting process up to a more democratic opportunity far better than the wild and crazy years of the “blue ribbon panels” (2002 – 2014) where random Television Academy members applied to judge categories by watching DVDs at home.

When it comes time to vote, voters cast their ballots online after certifying that they’ve watched the content for which they’re voting. Wink. Wink. They have until the end of Phase 2, August 28, to vote. It is my favorite day of the year. I will not accept questions at this time. Then, September brings both the Creative Arts Emmy Awards and the Primetime Emmy Awards.

And that’s how an Emmy is won!

Unless there’s a writer’s strike…