What To Read Into the 'WandaVision' and 'Mandalorian' Snubs

In a night filled with upsets and snubs, one of the more obvious narratives was the lack of breakthrough success for Disney+ and its shows. Despite an impressive number of nominations for “WandaVision” and “The Mandalorian,” Disney+ mostly sat out Sunday evening, racking up technical awards like Outstanding Stunt Performance or Sound Mixing and missing entirely on the higher-profile actor, writer, and direction categories.

READ MORE: See The Complete Winner’s List From the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards

So, as we often do in the hours following an awards ceremony, we find ourselves asking what it all means. Are comic book adaptations destined to face the same award season ambivalence on the small screen as their cinematic brethren? Do Hollywood voters just hate fun? The answers, as ever, are probably a little less exciting than we’d all care to admit.

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First, it’s important not to confuse lack of primetime success with failure. It was only a few days ago that the narrative surrounding “The Mandalorian” was that it was tied for the most nominations of any show at the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards; even if the show failed to take home awards in any of the major categories, shows like “Game of Thrones“—which took home several Oustanding Drama Series and actor wins—are the exception and not the rule. Poke around the history of high-profile genre shows like “Westworld” and “Stranger Things,” and you will see a high volume of nominations and a handful of awards for more technical categories like editing or makeup.

(It’s here that we should probably note that the two shows were hardly snubbed: “WandaVision” took home three Emmy awards in 2021⁠—including one for “Agatha All Along,” which I mean, if you had to pick one—and “The Mandalorian” made good on seven of its 24 nominations.)

READ MORE: ‘WandaVision’ Showrunner Jac Schaeffer Explains the Enduring Appeal Of “Agatha All Along”

In this regard, the Emmys somewhat mirror the Oscars, which—before expanding the number of Best Picture nominees in part to allow for more populist nominations—have traditionally preferred to relegate sci-fi, horror, and fantasy to the less momentous categories. Setting aside secondary factors like quality and the effectiveness of award season campaigns, it says something that it took a movie like Guillermo del Toro‘s “The Shape of Water” or Jordan Peele‘s “Get Out” are the rare genre films to make a sustained push at the Academy Awards. These movies dominated cultural conversations for months, and it takes a true cultural zeitgeist to break through some of the Emmy expectations.

Also, because the Emmy awards lump everything together in two broad categories—Drama and Comedy—shows like “WandaVision” are often asked to contort themselves into competing against shows it would otherwise never use as a reference point. Julianne Nicholson is being asked to deliver a very different type of performance in “Mare of Easttown” than Kathryn Hahn in “WandaVision.” While we can (and should) recognize each of them as excelling within the confines of their respective forms, one fits within the traditional concept of quality acting. Finding a shared critical language that allows us to evaluate a blue-collar everywoman and a comic book witch is a practice best reserved for critics and academics, not voters reinforcing their own concepts of art.

READ MORE: Apple TV+ Caps a Successful Night With an Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy for ‘Ted Lasso’

Of course, the other side of this is that voters are still warming to the concept of streaming platforms as serious contenders at the Emmy Awards. Sure, this year’s breakthrough performance for Ted Lasso” is a nice (and very significant) victory for Apple TV+ and its executives, but it also represents a shift in how the entire platform is perceived come award season. It wasn’t that long ago that we were discussing Netflix as an award season pariah. Until 2021, tonight, the streamer had failed to secure a win in the Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Comedy Series, and Outstanding Limited Series categories. As consumers, our opinions of streaming platforms may have changed with the times, but institutions tend to change a little slower.

All of which is to say that you probably shouldn’t read anything into the performance of Disney+ at the Emmys, at least this early in the game. Give the platform a few years to build out its lineup of original content, learn how to navigate the politics of award season campaigns, and perhaps give a black check to a few high-profile creators, you might see their fortunes change—and this could have an impact on all of their shows, not just the ones adapted from comic books and blockbuster movie franchises. The awards economy is not set for things like this to break through on a regular basis, and whether you believe that is a good thing or a bad thing is entirely beside the point. Success can be defined in countless different ways; in the end, the difference between a nomination and a win matters a whole lot more to Disney+ creators than it should to their audiences.

See our full coverage of the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards here.