It’s Emmy season, and we’re just a week away from the Television Academy announcing their 2016 nominees, and as has been the case in the last few years, they have a wealth of stuff to choose from, with “Game Of Thrones,” “House Of Cards,” “Orange Is The New Black,” “Downton Abbey,” “Veep,” “Transparent,” “Silicon Valley,” and “Fargo” all expected to bring in mighty hauls of nominations.
But the trouble with the Emmys is that it’s hard to break into an already established club: Voters like voting for the stuff they’ve nominated in the past, and generally only change their habits if a show ends and they’re physically unable to vote for it anymore. The end of some shows — “Mad Men,” “Parks & Recreation,” “Louie” — means that slots will open up for the likes of “Mr. Robot” and “Black-ish,” but in the era of peak TV, it does mean that a lot of great shows and performances get left out in the cold.
So we like to take this opportunity to make up for the inevitable nods for “Ray Donovan” and “American Horror Story” and “Modern Family” and highlight some of the performances that won’t be Emmy-nominated, but are just as amazing, if not more so, than anything that will be. Take a look at our 25 picks below and see a TV landscape of actors that’s more impressive than any time in its history, and let us know who’d be on your Emmy ballot in the comments.
Alan Alda – “Horace & Pete”
It remains to be seen how Louis C.K.’s grand experiment in multi-cam drama “Horace & Pete” goes down with Emmy voters (though Laurie Metcalf’s virtually assured the Guest Actress prize thanks to that spectacular monologue), but if we had our way, Alan Alda would be picking up his 35th nomination (!!!!!) for the show. Alda’s normally known for playing more genial figures, but his take on Uncle Pete (a role originally offered to Jack Nicholson, Joe Pesci and Christopher Walken) is a deeply sour, bigoted bully who’s never quite avuncular, but is nevertheless capable of love and compassion. As with so many of the veteran performers involved (Jessica Lange in particular), Alda takes C.K.’s great writing and makes it sing, and although he departs the show half-way through, killing himself off-stage after revealing to the younger Pete that he’s really his father, the turn haunts the rest of the show.
Louie Anderson – “Baskets”
Until recently, there was such a paucity of good roles for women in comedy that the idea of a male actor taking a female role would have felt like a stab in the back. Even with the scales more balanced these days, we’re sure someone probably got annoyed about the casting of comic Louie Anderson as the mother of Zach Galifianakis’ twins Chip and Dale in “Baskets.” But we feel like anyone who was upset didn’t see the turn, because Anderson’s exquisite work entirely justified the unconventional casting decision. As with much of the show, it plays into a comic tradition of comic-dressing that tracks back through Shakespeare, vaudeville and Tyler Perry, but Anderson never turns Christine (who was apparently written for Brenda Blethyn before producers turned to Anderson) into a caricature or a cartoon. In fact, he supposedly based his performance on his own mother, and the warmth and loneliness of the character proves indelible. It’s one of the most subversive, and effective, choices that TV made this year.
Maria Bamford – “Lady Dynamite”
For a long time, it felt like Maria Bamford was one of those comics who couldn’t quite find a break out of the stand-up circuit. Her material was just a little too strange, her take on the world a little too skewed, her subjects (often including her history of mental illness) a little too dark. But she shone in a cameo in the fourth season of “Arrested Development,” and the latter’s creator, Mitch Hurwitz, with “South Park” veteran Pam Brady, gave Bamford the perfect showcase with “Lady Dynamite.” The writing and direction perfectly meld with Bamford’s voice and persona, but it’d be nothing without Lady Dynamite herself at the center, and she’s completely wonderful, the nervy energy, uncomfortableness in her own skin and warmth making the leap from behind the stand-up mic and ensuring that, even at her darkest, you utterly adore the show’s version of Maria.
Loretta Devine – “The Carmichael Show”
Jerrod Carmichael’s revival of the Norman Lear-style sitcom with “The Carmichael Show” is one of the most pleasing (yet often uneasy in its ability to play devil’s advocate) things on TV right now, but just as welcome is the way that it gives great showcases to two great African-American comic performers in David Alan Grier and, in particular, Loretta Devine. After almost 40 years in the business, Devine’s a familiar face, but she’s never had a role as good as Cynthia Carmichael, Jerrod’s mother on the show. Her delivery of the more traditional sitcom stuff is impeccable, as you might expect, but she truly shone in “The Blues,” in which it emerges that her character is suffering depression. It didn’t suddenly come from nowhere — it felt like Devine had long been baking it into the performance from the start — and her portrait of a woman having a late-in-life identity crisis was highly moving as well as extremely funny.
Jim Broadbent – “London Spy”
A espionage story quite unlike any other, Tom Rob Smith’s “London Spy” smuggles a story of an ill-fated love affair into an espionage thriller, and is so successful in large part because of its heavyweight cast, and in particular Jim Broadbent as Scottie. Ben Whishaw plays Danny, an ordinary man who falls for Alex (Edward Holcroft), who, after he is murdered, proves to have been an MI6 agent, a job shared by Danny’s older friend (Broadbent). Scottie serves as a sort of old hand helping to mentor Whishaw’s Danny through the conspiracy that he’s stumbled upon, but he’s more than that too: a sad Ghost Of Christmas Future of what Danny could become, and a reminder of a time when the intelligence services persecuted gay people more openly than they did in Alex’s time. It’s sometimes easy to take Broadbent for granted, because he’s in every other thing you see, but when he’s this good, you remember why that’s the case.