“CONGRATULATIONS, OCTAVIA, I loved your project!” Emmy nomination host Leslie Jones screamed after the announcement of Octavia Spencer’s nod for Self Made, her Netflix series about the life of Black entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker.
Can the Emmys rise to the moment? With nominations landing after a two-month-long national reckoning over race, that was a major question looming over the awards, which have shown a troubling lack of racial diversity in the past. A recent report in the L.A. Times calculated that the vast majority of Primetime Emmy nominees in the last few years have been white.
This year there were 38 Black performers nominated for acting awards, a big bump up from last year. Those included Black-ish stars Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross, Insecure’s Issa Rae, Black Monday’s Don Cheadle, Pose’s Billy Porter, Thandie Newton of Westworld, and This Is Us star Sterling K. Brown.
It felt apt that HBO’s Watchmen topped the list with 26 nominations overall, more than any other show. Damon Lindelof’s ambitious limited series wrapped itself around the question of white supremacy. It opened with a recreation of one of the country’s most deadly incidents of racial violence: the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which white residents attacked Black residents, resulting in hundreds dead. Regina King, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jovan Adepo, Jean Smart, and Jeremy Irons all landed acting nominations for the limited series. Cord Jefferson is also one of the few Black writers to receive a nomination this year, with his being for “This Extraordinary Being,” an episode cowritten with Lindelof that focused on the life of a Tulsa massacre survivor battling white supremacy from inside the police force.
A handful of new Black actors made the list for the first time this year too. Zendaya made her Emmy nominee debut for her bravada performance as Rue in Euphoria; Insecure’s Yvonne Orji and Hollywood star Jeremy Pope got nods; and William Jackson Harper was recognized for his work as Chidi in the last season of The Good Place. Meanwhile, A Black Lady Sketch Show is up for an award, one of only three shows nominated in the sketch-comedy category this year, and Insecure finally made the list for best comedy series in its fourth season.
It was the supporting and guest categories that most bolstered the diversity figures, though. Supporting and guest actors included Uzo Aduba for Mrs. America, Mahershala Ali for Ramy, Giancarlo Esposito for both Better Call Saul and The Mandalorian, Andre Braugher for Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Tituss Burgess for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend.
Braugher and Burgess were both nominated for these roles for the fourth and fifth time, respectively. Anthony Anderson, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Kerry Washington, Don Cheadle, and Giancarlo Esposito have also had multiple nominations, many for the same roles.
In fact, many of the actors of color are frequently nominated but rarely win, suggesting a tokenism trap that the ceremony needs to avoid if it is serious about representing real change in Hollywood. And while there were gains for Black and Asian performers this year—and for Ramy Youssef, who is of Egyptian descent and was nominated for both lead actor and director for the second season of his Hulu comedy series, Ramy—the lack of Latinx recognition was glaring.
The Television Academy is well aware of the increasing pressure it faces to diversify its awards. “This year we are also bearing witness to one of the greatest fights for social justice in history,” Television Academy chairman and CEO Frank Scherma intoned in a live-streamed message prefacing the nominations. “And it is our duty to use this medium for change.”
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