Emmy Drama Hot List 2022

It’s been a little less than a year since the debut of Netflix’s smash hit Squid Game, and only from this distance are people beginning to understand the true scope of the show’s influence and registering that even if the series wasn’t the best of the season—which it very well might be—it was certainly the most important.

A record 11 performers of Asian, Southeast Asian and Asian-American descent received Emmy nominations this year, almost triple the four who landed noms last year.

Like Logan Roy at a hostile Waystar Royco board meeting, Succession crushed the competition on Emmy nomination day, setting a new record with its 14 acting nods. “We don’t do this alone,” said Brian Cox. “We do this with a lot of other people who are trying to be all for one, as it were. A unit.”

HBO’s limited series The White Lotus might just have been the buzziest show of last year, in no small part thanks to its incredibly gifted cast. The Television Academy clearly agreed, with 20 Emmy nominations overall for the series, eight of which recognized actors on the show created by Mike White.

Sydney Sweeney wants to be put through the wringer. And the two roles for which she was nominated this year—the emotional high schooler in Euphoria and the privileged socialite in The White Lotus—did just that.

In the drama categories, five performers received multiple nominations. Here’s a guide to the actor also nominated for producing and directing and the one with two different nominations for songwriting, among others.

It’s rare to experience a life-changing epiphany at any age, much less at 15. But that’s how old Kaitlyn Dever was when she played a self-harming young woman in the acclaimed 2013 indie Short Term 12—and that set her on a path that this year led to her first Emmy nomination for Dopesick.

When HBO Max’s sterling limited series Station Eleven began filming back in January 2020, lead actor Himesh Patel wasn’t a father, and he certainly wasn’t mired in a global pandemic like the one depicted in the show, which was adapted from Emily St. John Mandel’s novel of the same name. But oh, how things change.

When Better Call Saul wrapped its sixth and final season last winter in Albuquerque, Rhea Seehorn drove from New Mexico “just to clear my head, to get back to L.A. And it was sad,” she said. Her first Emmy nomination for the acclaimed series, and another for the short-form series Cooper’s Bar, might have helped her cheer up.

After four seasons of weaving and bobbing their way through money laundering, evading the watchful eye of the FBI and keeping a scary Mexican drug cartel’s deadlier impulses at bay—all while maintaining a dinner-on-the-table nuclear family unit—the Byrde family (led by Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) finally seemed ready fly the coop in style in the final season of Ozark. Or did they? Showrunner Chris Mundy explained.

When it comes to streaming platforms landing Emmy nominations, the attention usually goes to the giant, Netflix. But the upstart Hulu had the biggest surge of any platform this year, and Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video saw big boosts as well.

Christina Ricci has made her share of comedies but prefers darker material. That might be why she was attracted to the dark and mysterious Showtime series Yellowjackets—and also why it was challenging for her to play a character who was in some ways the series’ comic relief. “I am not a comedian,” she said. “When I focus on laughs, it’s terrible.”

If Christina Ricci was a mild surprise among the Yellowjackets nominations, the show’s other acting nominee, Melanie Lynskey, has been a favorite since she won the Critics Choice Award in February. But when people tell her she’s long overdue, she demurred. “I doesn’t feel long overdue to me,” she said. “It’s just the most wonderful, joyful thing.”

Back when Michael Showalter was known for MTV’s The State, Wet Hot American Summer, or Search Party, you wouldn’t necessarily have picked him as a candidate to be the first director to guide one actress to an Oscar win and another to an Emmy win in the same year. But he accomplished the first part in March when Jessica Chastain won for The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and he’s got a good shot at the second with Amanda Seyfried and The Dropout.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar landed his second Emmy nomination for narrating Black Patriot: Heroes of the Civil War, but the basketball legend is facing a foe as formidable as Wilt Chamberlain or Julius Erving. As the Lakers announcer might put it: “From Harvard Law School, Number 44, Barack Oooo-bama!“

When it came to filming the first season of the Apple TV+ series Severance, Adam Scott could relate to the series’ central concept of a procedure that can completely separate a person’s work-life consciousness from their personal life. That’s because filming during the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic was like being in the Wild West, with Scott describing a life of being shuttled in a van between the show’s set and the empty apartment where he spent his nights alone.

The Emmys’ Outstanding Television Movie category is an odd one this year, with four of the five nominees adapted from existing TV projects: Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Ray Donovan: The Movie, Reno 911!: The Hunt for QAnon and Zoey’s Extraordinary Christmas. The only original film in the group is HBO’s The Survivor, a harrowing drama from Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson that stars Ben Foster as Harry Haft, a boxer who survived Auschwitz by fighting other inmates to the death for the amusement of the Nazi guards.

This year’s trio of posthumous nominees includes a fi;m legend who left us too soon, a veteran comic who left behind a new comedy special and a beloved actress who has received two nominations since her death in March 2021.

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, the Disney animated series and cornerstone of the Disney Afternoon syndicate programming block, is probably not the kind of property you imagine the company resurrecting as a splashy live-action/animation hybrid. And it’s certainly not the type of movie that’s usually nominated in the Emmys’ Outstanding Television Movie category, which has always recognized nothing but totally live-action and usually serious films.

Voters in the Television Academy clearly love the Duffer brothers’ Netflix series Stranger Things, which this year was nominated for Outstanding Drama Series for the fourth time in its four seasons. Except that maybe they don’t love its acting. Or its directing. Or its writing.