Not Britain’s night at the Emmy awards
There were a few wins for British talent at the 64th Primetime Emmy awards in LA – but American dramas dominated the night, with Homeland and Modern Family scooping the major prizes.
It was a night when America’s cable television came into its own: dominating this year’s Emmy awards, and seeing off the challenge not just from Britain’s much-praised Downton Abbey, but pushing the broadcast networks well out of the picture.
The gritty thriller Homeland, produced by Showtime, picked up the most awards, including best drama series, best lead actress for Claire Danes, and outstanding lead actor for British star Damien Lewis, who plays US soldier and former hostage Nicholas Brody.
He called the award “an extraordinary honour”, describing his fellow nominees as “golden actors… in a golden age of TV”, and admitted he was “one of those pesky Brits”.
Despite a record number of nominations for ITV1’s Downton Abbey, Dame Maggie Smith was the show’s only success, scooping best supporting actress. But perhaps no-one was hoping to sweep the board: earlier, in typically self-deprecating style, Hugh Bonneville had joked that he would “eat my own toe” if he won the best actor award.
Host Jimmy Kimmel joked about the large number of British nominees: “Television is an American institution, yet one out of every five actors here tonight is British. I guess we’re supposed to award them because they went to the Royal Shakespeare Academy and ours were discovered at the mall”.
Network losers
America’s broadcast networks, however, were perhaps the biggest losers: for the first time they were not even nominated in the best drama category and were reduced to using the primetime award ceremony to promote clips of their own shows, at every chance they could.
Appropriately enough, though, in this presidential election year, there was a definite nod to politics: the best mini-series category was dominated by Game Change, a drama about the 2008 election campaign by Time journalist Mark Halperin.
The show, a dramatised version of the Sarah Palin campaign, scooped best mini-series and best lead actress for Julianne Moore, who said she felt validated because “Sarah Palin gave me a big thumbs down”.
The political comedy Veep, written by Britain’s own Armando Iannuci, also won its star Julia Louis-Dreyfus best actress in a comedy.
Even Damien Lewis could not resist commenting on America’s political landscape, telling reporters it had become particularly polarised: “I think there’s a problem socially between rich and poor – but hey, guess what, that’s the same in my country, so we’re all struggling at the moment a little bit.”
However he described television as the “great democratic art form”, saying Homeland had managed to become part of a national conversation. “It’s politically current and that grounds it in a reality – and people are responding to it for that reason.”
Reality, it certainly is not. But as an escape from the relentlessly grim news about the state of the economy, clever writing and slick production mean the best television shows are staying fit, and relevant, even in this internet age.