It is, at this point, a laughable numbers game. Roughly 500 original scripted shows have aired on TV this past Emmys season, and yet there are only six or seven slots per category to reward the excellent shows and performers. How in the world do you choose?
Emmy voters typically respond infuriatingly, returning to the same series and actors year after year, or flocking to predictably dark, angsty awards bait with big movie stars in the leads.
That isn’t always a bad thing, not when you have Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sandra Oh, and the standouts from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Barry, and Game of Thrones in the mix. But for those other slots, may we offer up instead of the usual fare and the predicted, heavily publicized performances, these under-the-radar contenders who delivered some of the best work of the year in TV?
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Here are 20 of our favorite performances we hope make it onto Emmy voters’ radar before voting ends June 24.
Christina Applegate – Dead to Me
Best Actress in a Comedy Series
It is so gratifying to watch a performer as seasoned and beloved as Christina Applegate finally get a role that excavates layers of her skills as an actress. The levels of pain and anger she unleashes in Dead to Me as a grieving widow are shaded so cleverly with her exasperated, tart-tongued one-liners that you’ll often lose track of whether you’re laughing or crying—just knowing that you’re feeling something real.
Danielle Brooks – Orange Is the New Black
Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series
Brooks has been a standout on Netflix’s longest running series from the start. But as her storyline has moved to center stage of the film’s exploration of injustice in the prison system, Brooks has been a towering presence. Especially knowing how goofy and bright Taystee’s light was when we first met her, it’s heartbreaking to watch it dim as she confronts the inevitability of her fate. Through it all, Brooks delivers a shattering performance that demands awards attention.
Asa Butterfield – Sex Education
Best Actor in a Drama Series
With awards voters so used to straining their eyes in the darkness of the fare they so reflexively reward, it’s easy to imagine them being a bit blinded by the brightness, humor, and heart of Netflix’s teen dramedy Sex Education. Of particular note is the endearing, bumbling vulnerability Asa Butterfield brings to its protagonist teen boy, attempting to reckon with his awkward place in a world—his home, his school, everywhere—obsessed with sex.
Sian Clifford – Fleabag
Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series
There’s something that happens after you’ve finished the masterful second season of Fleabag, once you’ve cooled off from the Hot Priest and the intense chemistry between Andrew Scott and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. You realize the reason the entire season worked was because of Sian Clifford’s complicated performance as Fleabag’s sister, Claire. It’s a brilliant turn that sneaks up on you, but once it does it stays with you. I, for one, can’t stop thinking about it.
Rob Delaney – Catastrophe
Best Actor in a Comedy Series
Catastrophe was just so good. It was dark and real and funny, and then just extremely painful. Rob Delaney co-created, co-wrote, and co-starred in the series with the magnificent Sharon Horgan, crafting the most relatable depiction of a marriage TV has ever seen, which means capturing it at its bleakest as often as at its most tender. But throughout the course of filming, Carrie Fisher, who played Delaney’s mother, as well as his real-life young son died. The final season is underscored in that tragedy and by that mourning. Hard as it is to face, it’s beautiful to watch.
Stephen Dorff – True Detective
Best Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie
It’s the quiet work that too often goes unnoticed, and it would be a shame if Dorff’s performance on the most recent—and franchise-saving—season of True Detective is passed over because of that. It’s some of the best work of the actor’s career, coloring the gruffness and wry humor you’d expect from a grizzled detective with a compelling, deliberate wrestling with demons.
Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle – PEN15
Best Actress in a Comedy Series
Like Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana and Key & Peele’s, well, Key and Peele, I don’t know how you extricate one performance from the other when it comes to these two. PEN15’s central gimmick—two women in their early thirties portraying the awkward trauma of middle-school girls—only works because of how un-gimmicky they make it, and the amount of empathy and cringe-inducing pathos they bring. But it’s also due to how intense a bond these two exceptional actresses forge. By the end of season one, you want to give Maya and Anna a hug. How about some Emmy love, too?
Sally Field – Maniac
Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie
All the attention was on Emma Stone and Jonah Hill when the trippy sci-fi fever dream Maniac premiered on Netflix in September. But it’s two-time Oscar winner Field who, playing a narcissistic self-help guru among a handful of other roles, nails the show’s precarious tonal tightrope walk. She puts on a big show, a daffy performance exploding with histrionics. But she does it so confidently, without so much as a wobble, that it’s this circus-act series’ biggest thrill.
Maggie Gyllenhaal – The Deuce
Best Actress in a Drama Series
Every time Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Candy appears on screen in The Deuce, you can see her negotiating: What is her power at that moment? What is she willing to sacrifice? How is she being viewed? What does she really want? It happens in fleeting moments, none more powerful than a scene in which she finally sees the opportunity for more dangled in front of her—to direct her own film—but then is also confronted with what it will cost her to have it. It’s the finest-acted moment I’ve seen this awards season.
Stephan James – Homecoming
Best Actor in a Drama Series
It’s no small task: to go toe-to-toe with Julia Roberts, in her best role in years, in her first regular TV role, in two-person dialogue scenes that lasted upwards of 15 minutes. But James’s work on Homecoming, as impressive as it was given the A-list scene partner he was given, stands on its own, a brittle portrait of PTSD and hope. James manages to make seismic emotional impact with just the slightest shift in his expression or cadence, making a scorching mark in a quiet burn of a series.
Jharrel Jerome – When They See Us
Best Actor in a Limited Series or Movie
As Korey Wise, Jerome is the only actor to play one of the men known as the Central Park Five both as a teenager and adult. As Korey is wrongfully convicted, endures a violent 13 years in jail, and is exonerated, Jerome turns in a subtle performance that builds into an emotional knockout. It’s the kind of devastating, visceral star turn that makes viewers lean in and ask, “Who is he?” Here’s hoping Emmy voters find out.
Dan Levy – Schitt’s Creek
Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series
Don’t forget about Catherine O’Hara’s wondrous performance as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek—or Eugene Levy, Annie Murphy, Noah Reid, Emily Hampshire, and the whole cast, for that matter. But let’s not overlook the specific, hilarious musicality of Dan Levy’s performance as David, delivered with a kind of whimsical gesticulation, as if he’s conducting his own speech like an orchestra. More, it’s an unapologetically queer performance in a world that doesn’t bother to ask anyone to apologize—something I, for one, have never seen before.
Matthew MacFadyen – Succession
Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series
Within seconds of Matthew MacFadyen arriving on screen as the desperate-to-please, upwardly mobile beau to Sarah Snook’s Shiv Roy on Succession, you wonder, “What is this guy’s deal?” Ten episodes of epic levels of weirdo later, I don’t think I was any closer to knowing the answer. But I’ve never had more fun trying to figure something out.
Niecy Nash – Claws
Best Actress in a Drama Series
No actor on TV is capable of moving as deftly between outlandish and devastated, fabulous and tragic, hopeful and defeated as Niecy Nash. On Claws, she may sometimes wield her fake nails as weapons, but there’s not a false note in the humanity those talons are protecting. It’s the kind of character and wild premise—nail salon owner gets entangled with the Florida mafia—that should have voters salivating. Why haven’t they caught on?
Paula Pell – Documentary Now!
Best Guest Actress in a Comedy Series
There’s a buffet of uproarious performances to choose from on this season of Documentary Now!: Cate Blanchett as a Marina Abramovic stand-in? Owen Wilson does Wild, Wild Country? Even just in the Original Cast Album: Co-Op episode, there’s John Mulaney, Richard Kind, Taran Killam, and more. But Paula Pell’s cantankerous-turned-triumphant homage to Elaine Stritch is too inspired to ignore. “I gotta go!”
Sally Phillips – Veep
Best Guest Actress in a Comedy Series
There is not one syllable that comes out of Sally Phillips’ mouth as Minna, the often-oblivious Finnish prime minister, that doesn’t have me in stitches. She’s done this reliably through the entire run of Veep, and the show was kind enough to gift us with one last awkward Minna swan song. Let us finally pay it the attention it deserves.
Natasha Rothwell – Insecure
Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series
On Insecure, Natasha Rothwell does that whole “scene-stealing” thing everyone loves to praise, and does it often with only the delivery of one line. Hell, with just one look. But what makes Rothwell so damn good on the show is that it’s not just drive-by comedy. In fits and starts—and certainly with those looks—she telegraphs her character’s entire emotional journey, who she fully is. And that, among other things, is the character on TV you want to spend time with the most.
Ashton Sanders – Native Son
Best Actor in a Limited Series or Movie
This is a category where big, veteran movie stars are fawned over, and there are plenty of those for Emmy voters to consider this year: Hugh Grant, Mahershala Ali, Ian McShane, Jonah Hill, Sam Rockwell, Benicio Del Toro…) But voters would be wise to remember the Moonlight co-star’s powerful work as a young black man in Chicago reduced in a spiraling moment to a horrific act of desperation.
Molly Shannon – The Other Two
Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series
Molly Shannon is so good at what she does, making it look so effortless, that it might slip past you how mind-blowingly genius her acting is. There’s an episode in The Other Two, one of the hands-down funniest shows of 2019, where her character, the mother to a rising YouTube star, has an emotional breakdown that contains both the highest comedy moments and most intense dramatic notes of the year. It will leave you breathless.
Marisa Tomei – Live in Front of a Studio Audience…
Best Actress in a Limited Series or Movie
A year in this category that is blanketed in darkness and angst could use the burst of pure sunshine that is Tomei’s take on Edith Bunker during the All in the Family portion of ABC’s live broadcasts of classic Norman Lear episodes. She somehow summoned the spirit of Jean Stapleton’s batty, endearingly earnest performance and made it freshly her own, earning some of the biggest TV smiles of the year.
