My Emmy Ballot: Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy

Cristin Milioti sparkled as "How I Met Your Mother's" eponymous character

As I wrote in my comedy supporting actor piece, this has been a banner year for comedy and nowhere is that more obvious than in the ballot for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy.  As I prepared my nominations shortlist I realized that fully half of the actresses I was considering were from new comedies and that doesn’t even take into account potentially Emmy-worthy performances from Allison Janney and Niecy Nash, who were on shows I didn’t watch.  There isn’t much room on the ballot for new performers, but it would be great to see a handful break through, especially those from the amazingly diverse cast of Orange Is the New Black.

As always, I'm using the actual Emmy Performer Ballot, so I can’t put leads who submitted as supporting (Amy Schumer) or supporting actors who submitted as leads (Rob Lowe) in their proper category, nor can I put shows that probably should be in drama (Orange Is the New Black) or comedy (Key & Peele) into their appropriate categories, nor can I nominate somebody who didn’t submit themselves (like anybody on Enlisted not named Parker Young).  Also, I’m only including actors from shows I watch regularly, so if your favorites from The Middle, Nurse Jackie, Veep, or Raising Hope aren’t here, that’s why.

My 2013 Choices:

Mayim Bialik (The Big Bang Theory)

Carly Chaikin (Suburgatory)

Elisha Cuthbert (Happy Endings)

Jenna Fischer (The Office)

Jane Krakowski (30 Rock)

Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation)

Actual 2013 Emmy Nominees:

Mayim Bialik (The Big Bang Theory)

Julie Bowen (Modern Family)

Anna Chlumsky (Veep)

Jane Krakowski (30 Rock)

Jane Lynch (Glee)

Sofia Vergara (Modern Family)

Merritt Wever (Nurse Jackie) – 2013 Emmy Winner

Merritt Wever was the surprise winner last year and gave a correspondingly great acceptance speech.  This year’s nominees could be just as surprising.  30 Rock is done and it feels like Glee has run its course as a cultural touchstone, which should open a pair of slots.  I also feel like Mayim Bialik wasn’t asked to do as much this year as perhaps in the past, though she might have the strongest single episode in “The Locomotive Manipulation.” 

The biggest question, however, is how the new faces will fare.  Orange Is the New Black has the Netflix cachet (if not the names) that got House of Cards a bucket of nominations last year, features a huge cast of great supporting characters, and just happened to drop its second season right at the start of Emmy voting season. Allison Janney and Margo Martindale are drama stalwarts returning to television and making the move to comedy with a combined seven Emmy nominations and five wins between them.  And there are at least a half dozen more actresses on new shows who are extremely unlikely to get nominated but are still worth consideration.  The Modern Family women probably aren’t going anywhere, but with as many strong, new candidates there are this year, I could see anything happening with those other four spots.

As I said in my supporting actor post, I generally like to limit myself to one actor from each show, but I feel like I’m going to be breaking that rule a lot this year.  In this category, it’s impossible not to recognize at least two women from one of “television’s” (or whatever we’re calling Netflix this week) strongest and most diverse casts.  Thankfully, Uzo Aduba submitted herself as a guest actress so I don’t have to find room for three Orange Is the New Black actresses, but Danielle Brooks and Kate Mulgrew make great nominees on their own.  Brooks had the meatiest of the supporting storylines as Taystee first left, then returned to prison for lack of any real options on the outside.  It was a disheartening, if honest story that appropriately portrays the difficulties many convicts have returning to a “normal” life once released from prison.  Without any kind of support system outside, it’s easy to see how Taystee could get lost and ultimately make the decision that life inside is better than life on the street.  Mulgrew, meanwhile, got to play a villain and seemed to relish the role.  It would have been easy for her to go over the top with the role, but she kept the character grounded in emotion.  Red wasn’t evil.  She was prideful.  And when that pride was injured, she lashed out.  It made for a riveting but realistic performance.

I pounded the drum for Carly Chaikin last year too but got nowhere then because, let’s face it, Suburgatory is not a show that gets a lot of love from either viewers or Emmy voters.  This honestly wasn’t as great of a year for Chaikin’s Dalia, but that’s mostly because of a heavy focus on other supporting characters (Lisa and Malik most notably).  While she may not have gotten as much time on screen, the dry wit and amazing consistency of both the character and the actress meant that her laughs per appearance ratio remained incredibly high.  Suburgatory was canceled this year and Chaikin is one of three actresses on this list whose shows won’t be on next year.  It really is a shame because, while Suburgatory was never the kind of show that could knock at a classic television season, it had a unique sensibility and consistently hilarious, dry supporting woman.

I wanted to recognize one of Trophy Wife’s supporting actresses and was really trying to find a way to get a second in here but, ultimately, one seems right and it is Marcia Gay Harden.  What I loved most about Trophy Wife was how instantly the cast (with the exception of Natalie Morales, though that wasn’t her fault) gelled together and one of the big reasons for that was Harden.  What impressed me most was her ability to play off of any character.  Put her with ex-husband Pete, and she’s the ice queen.  Pair her with Kate and she’s aloof but sympathetic.  With the kids, she’s the stern, loving overseer who’s always three steps ahead.  She even manages a rapport with batty, awkward middle wife Jackie.  Harden is required to play the straight woman most of the time, but she still finds ways to make me laugh.

I generally find Saturday Night Live to be an incredibly inconsistent show, but when it hits, it hits hard, and one of the funniest voices the show has belongs to Kate McKinnon.  I briefly considered Cecily Strong for this spot, but her role as host of Weekend Update means that she’s not as frequently present throughout the rest of the show and McKinnon gets a big boost because she has such a talent for creating instantly realized characters.  A lot of SNL players have an assortment of impressions and recurring characters and McKinnon is no different, whether it’s Olya Povlatsky on Weekend Update, Angela Merkel, or Ellen.  But what makes her excel is her ability to build an entire personality in a three minute sketch, whether it’s her game show mom or her stranger in a bar in “Last Call.”  Telling a complete story with notable characters is SNL’s biggest struggle (note how often they return to the same wells when former cast members or previous hosts return), but McKinnnon does it extremely well.

I did not care for the How I Met Your Mother finale.  I ultimately saw what they were trying to do, but found it to be a complete failure in execution.  Part of what hurt that finale, however, was that the show had done such a good job at building up the mother during the final season that the way she was treated during the finale felt like a betrayal.  I would not have had nearly the negative reaction that I had if I did not care about the mother as much as I did and much of the credit for that goes to Cristin Milioti.  The mother could have been nothing; she could have been infuriating; she could have been boring.  But she wasn’t.  She was lovable, cute, and, above all, perfect for Ted.  And it’s no accident that the best episode of the season was “How Your Mother Met Me,” which focused entirely on Milioti.  Much of what made the final season so disappointing was the feeling that the previous seasons could have been made so much better by bringing Milioti in years earlier.

Others Meriting Consideration: Stephanie Beatriz, Mayim Bialik, Laura Prepon, Cecily Strong, Michaela Watkins, Allison Williams

Previously: Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy

So those are my Emmy choices.  Agree?  Disagree?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and an amateur television critic.  You can reach him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

On Second Thought: Revisiting the How I Met Your Mother Finale

All complaints aside, this scene really was amazing.

I had a, let’s say, “negative” reaction to last night’s finale for How I Met Your Mother borne mostly out of what I felt was a destruction of what the show had been for the last several years – an attempt to return the series to where it was in season two, at the creative height of its run.  For the record, I still believe in that interpretation, that the finale was a misguided attempt by its creators to fit where the show was now with the ending they had conceived and filmed in 2007.  But as I gave it more thought today I kept coming back to the fact that I very much enjoyed many of the scenes in the finale* and that there were many ideas packed into the episode that, given more space from the need to wrap up seventeen years’ worth of plot in forty minutes, actually were worth exploring.  So I tried to divorce myself from the resentment caused by the episode’s final twist** and figure out what the episode was trying to say about love and death and hope and family.  What I realized is that “Last Forever” was a noble attempt to really change the way we think about love that was destined to fail because of decisions made years ago.

* If they had put the scene at the platform between Ted and the Mother at the end of any other episode I would have called it my favorite scene of the series with only the two-minute date possibly excepted.

** I have had this happen before where my expectations for an episode significantly colored my initial reaction.  In this case, thanks to the predictive powers of the internet, I realized the twist was coming right about when Robin and Barney announced they were getting divorced and spent the rest of the episode dreading that conclusion.

I wrote on Twitter last night that if every decision we make leads to an alternate timeline, then somewhere there is a universe with a perfect HIMYM finale, but that we were surely in the darkest timeline.  Upon consideration, however, we may not have been that far from the perfect finale after all.  The individual elements could have made for an amazing, if somewhat morose, season of television.  Notice that I said “season” and not “episode,” because where “Last Forever” fails is in trying to cram seventeen years of character development into two episodes.  Parceled out over twenty-two episodes, there’s no reason these elements and developments couldn’t have been successful.

Imagine with me our alternate universe, in which the final season of HIMYM is not set almost entirely at Barney and Robin’s wedding, but instead takes place over the course of the seventeen years in between the wedding and 2030.  The first three episodes of the season are set at the wedding, sparing us some of the weaker episodes of the season like “whose mom makes better scrambled eggs.”  Episode four is essentially “How Your Mother Met Me,” except it ends with Ted and Tracy meeting for the first time on the Farhampton train platform in the same beautiful scene we saw last night.  Critics and fans alike immediately laud it as one of the series’ finest half-hours, though perhaps lamenting that it all had to be in one episode.  Episode Five: Ted moves to the suburbs and has his first date with Tracy.  Episode Seven or Eight: They return to Farhampton where Ted proposes and they learn Tracy is pregnant.  Episode Nine: Barney and Robin divorce.  Episodes Ten through Twelve:  Barney’s a lout again and Robin can’t handle it so she leaves (all this has happened before…).  Episode Fifteen: Barney’s daughter is born and Ted and Tracy get married.  Episode Eighteen: Tracy gets sick.  Episode Twenty: Tracy dies.  The series concludes with Ted (and the audience) getting a proper grieving period before he runs into Robin again in the finale and the two have the chance to potentially reunite again.

It probably wouldn’t be a perfect season, but it’s filled with stories worth telling, contains all of the major beats Carter Bays and Craig Thomas had in the season finale and, most importantly, it gives the show the time to properly explore the two big themes they seemed to be trying to get across last night: Nothing lasts forever and there’s no such thing as a One True Love.

One of the parts where “Last Forever” was strongest last night was in its portrayal of the lives of no-longer-young adults.  As friends pair up, have kids, move out of the city, and take new jobs, they tend to fall out of each other’s lives bit by bit.  Nights are spent on homework and PTA meetings instead of at the bar or the strip club (except for the eternal man-child Barney of course).  You start to see your friends only on the big occasions: Births, deaths, weddings.  These things happen.  We grow.  We evolve.  And while the distancing of once-close friends is sad, it’s also a necessity, so that we can find the time to bring new things into our lives.

Sitcoms are largely about stasis.  Relationships may change and characters may leave, but for the most part the show at the end is largely the same as the show at the beginning.  HIMYM tried to be different.  They tried to show how much people change and grow and how that growth can cause even the best of friends to drift apart.  Unfortunately, the show didn’t spend an entire season exploring that idea, they stuffed it all into one hour and it got lost in the rush to cover every plot point.

The other Big Idea that “Last Forever” tried to discuss was perhaps its most controversial: There is no such thing as One True Love.  Where the series finale fell the hardest was in its rush to dissolve Ted’s and Robin’s respective relationships in order to give them a happy ending together.  It left the impression that the writers didn’t respect those marriages.  They were merely waypoints on the two characters’ journeys toward each other.  I don’t think that’s what Bays and Thomas intended, though.  I believe they were trying to make the argument that love doesn’t follow the rules of romantic comedies.  Sometimes you learn that the love of your life in 2013 is not the love for your life in 2017.  You discover that the man you love in 2017 is unavailable to you.  Sometimes the woman you love more than anything in the world is unjustly taken from you and you get lost in your stories.  But even if those loves couldn’t last forever, on occasion the universe will throw a bone your way and let you fall in love all over again. 

It’s not an idea that’s often explored, especially in sitcoms, where characters are often brought together but rarely split apart.  But in the real world things are usually not so simple as “Boy meets girl and they live happily ever after.”  Couples break up and spouses die.  But it’s nice to imagine that even in the face of heartbreak and loss there might be another True Love out there waiting for us.  It’s a beautiful, touching idea that would be well worth discussing on television (and very well may have been at some point).  But it’s an idea that needs an entire season to explore, not a single episode.

Ultimately, HIMYM took a huge chance in its series finale.  It explored two difficult themes that are more often left to dramas than sitcoms – themes that it had dabbled in for nine years but had never committed to completely.  It could have been a home run.  But what made the show miss so badly was its slavish devotion to ideas hatched seven years ago.  Bays and Thomas wanted to put Ted and Robin together and they didn’t want Ted to meet the Mother until the very end of the series.  Unfortunately reconciling those desires with the story they wanted to tell meant trying to kick off two separate relationships simultaneously, which was bound to leave one of them feeling empty. 

“The Mother was dead to begin with…This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”

It’s been said in the wake of the finale that ambitious shows are often treated more kindly by history than those that go out with “just another episode.”  Perhaps that’s true.  Perhaps people coming to this show in future will know the twist in advance and look more kindly on the journey.  I used the above paraphrase of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol last night as a quip but maybe it’s true.  Maybe understanding that the Mother was dead to begin with will make this story wonderful.  There’s been a lot of vitriol and venom spewed at HIMYM in the past twenty-four hours.  And while I agree that the show failed in execution, I have to applaud its audacity.  Bays and Thomas may have struck out with their finale, but they went down swinging for the fences.

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and an amateur television critic.  You can email him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or find him on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

How I Met Your Mother Series Finale Review: "Last Forever" - Endings and Beginnings

Ted and Tracy together at last in "How I Met Your Mother"

I am not a “that finale ruined the last X years of the show for me” kind of person.  I swear, I’m not.  In fact, I’m generally very forgiving of series finales, even the controversial ones.  I loved most of the Lost finale even if I thought the actual plot was a bit of a mess.  I wasn’t totally sold on the Battlestar Galactica finale but it hit enough emotionally satisfying beats for me that I could ultimately enjoy it.  When it comes to finales, I don’t need every plot point wrapped with a neat little bow.  I don’t need numerous callbacks to the show’s best running jokes.  I just need emotional closure that feels earned and to feel like the ending of the show is appropriate to the seasons that came before it.  And while the How I Met Your Mother finale actually almost did one of these things it only managed to accomplish that feat by taking back every single thing the show has spent the last nine years telling us.

“The Mother was dead to begin with…This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”

Looking back, it was obvious.  It was plainly obvious that this wasn’t the story of how Ted met his kids’ mother.  It was the story of how he never got over their Aunt Robin.  We’ve seen countless times that Ted has never been able to leave Robin behind.  Even in the week before her wedding he searched far and wide for the token he thought could win her back.  Sure he backed off at the last second, but the intent was still clear.  And it was clear that Barney and Robin couldn’t last.  Their relationship was just too volatile.  I mean, they spent their entire wedding weekend fighting over every little thing and while I appreciate the callback to Barney’s vow never to lie to Robin this wasn’t a relationship built on trust and respect.  It was a relationship built on narrative convenience.   It was easy to put the two together so they did it, logic be damned. 

What is most infuriating is how my rage over this finale revealed how much I was actually invested in these characters and how quickly and meticulously the writers dismantled that investment.  I discovered that I actually liked the idea of Barney and Robin as a couple.  Well, too bad, because we’re going to break them up before the first commercial break.  I discovered that I was really invested in the Mother, but apparently Bays and Thomas decided that I didn’t need to see any stories between when they got married and when she died except for a ten-second narrated scene of her in the hospital.  I discovered during this finale that I wanted to see these characters find love and happiness.  Instead we got divorce and death.

There’s nothing exactly wrong with death and divorce on a sitcom.  After all, this is a show about friends in their 30s moving into their 40s and these are things that happen.  Friends break up.  We lose family members.  But HIMYM was not a show based on pain and loss.  Sure we saw these things occasionally, most notably in the death of Marshall's father.  But fundamentally, it was a show based on, above all else, the idea that love matters.  That love is worth the wait.  And maybe that’s the story Bays and Thomas were trying to tell.  That the love between Ted and Robin was worth the wait.  It was worth eight years of going back and forth.  It was worth a marriage to the wrong man and the death of the right woman.  All those things were worth going through to get to the point where Ted could stand on Robin’s stoop, blue French horn in hand.  That’s the moment they wanted (clearly since they wrote and filmed it eight years ago), but here’s the thing, if you want that moment you don’t call the show How I Met Your Mother.  You call it How I Moved On From Your Mother (h/t Ryan McGee).  You don’t spend nine seasons bringing two couples together only to rip them asunder in the last forty minutes.  That’s not fair play.  It’s not earned storytelling.  It’s a trick played on the audience.  It’s saying “Ha Ha! You thought you were watching one thing when it was really another.  Joke’s on you!”  And maybe the joke is on me.  But, as I said before, I don’t want my finales to be clever.  I want them to be emotionally satisfying.  And when you spend nine years (at least one in earnest) getting me to invest in a certain storyline, I’ll be upset when the rug is yanked out from beneath me.

I think that Bays and Thomas really did want us to see this as a happy ending.  The kids (who are obviously the audience surrogates) tell Ted that they’re on board with him dating Aunt Robin.  After all, “it’s been six years.”  But for us it hasn’t been six years.  It’s been thirty seconds since we got confirmation that the Mother, this character we’ve been investing the last 22 episodes in, is dead.  Even if that particular plot development was implied a few weeks ago and heavily hinted at throughout the evening, you still need to give your audience time to digest.  You don’t just get to drop the character with a thudding “and then she died, but I got over it.”

I could go on, but I think I’m going to stop.  I got my point across.  This was a series finale that fundamentally betrayed everything the show had been about for nine seasons.  It took characters and relationships that it had built over that time and meticulously deconstructed them for no other purpose than to pull one over on the audience.  This is not an objection to the individual plot points.  I think they could have served perfectly well had HIMYM been canceled after its first season (when this ending was apparently written and filmed) and Victoria would have been the mother.  But as the culmination of nine seasons worth of storytelling, they failed to bring closure to the series they had created.  Perhaps HIMYM can serve as a warning to all future serialized storytellers that the ending you have at the beginning might not be the one you need in the end.

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and amateur television critic.  You can email him at tytalkstvATgmailDOTcom or find him on Twitter @TyTalksTV.