It may be the biggest head-scratcher of the night.
When Emmy voters go to weigh in on a category called “Outstanding Variety Series,” they won’t be picking Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, “Saturday Night Live” or “The Daily Show,” the way they would for other categories.
Instead they’ll be asking themselves: How many of the late-night shows should win?
Because of an arcane rule change, voters will be able to endorse multiple or even all of the shows in the category. There could be multiple winners onstage hoisting up Emmys on Monday.
This odd development has a lot to do with the collapsing state of late-night. Over the past few years, the number of late-night series has drastically declined, and so has advertising revenue. Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” went off the air in May, and networks like CBS and TBS and streamers like Netflix and Hulu have effectively given up on the genre.
For the last decade, traditional daily comedic talk shows like “The Daily Show” and “The Late Show” competed in one category (outstanding talk series) and heavily scripted late-night shows with a less frequent cadence like “Saturday Night Live” and John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” competed in another (outstanding variety sketch series).
Earlier this year, however, the Television Academy made a rule change. Given the “reduced number of submissions” for both categories, as the academy put it, Emmy organizers decided to collapse all the candidates into one category: best variety series.
The academy then decided that a talk show like “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was so different from a scripted series like “S.N.L.” that the new variety series category had to become a so-called area award.
And what on earth is that?
“A category is usually deemed an area award because the submissions vary so widely that they can’t be directly compared against each other,” a Television Academy spokesman told The Times.
Area awards are usually reserved for technical categories like best choreography in a scripted series or outstanding special effects for a single episode. Now, in the diminished landscape, comedic late-night shows apparently fall under the same banner.
When they submitted their final online ballots in August, Emmy voters were asked to answer “yes” or “no” to a question alongside each variety series nominee: Does this program merit an Emmy? Voters could click “yes” for every nominee if they felt like it.
Any show that earns 90 percent or more “yes” votes wins an Emmy. If multiple shows cross the 90 percent threshold, there will be multiple winners. And if no show hits the 90 percent threshold, the winner is whichever had the highest percentage of “yes” votes.
The category promises to be an interesting one. Will Emmy voters reward Colbert after giving him a big win last year? Or will they vote for Jimmy Kimmel, who became something of a cause célèbre after his network, ABC, temporarily suspended his show amid criticism from President Trump and threats from the Federal Communications Commission. The other entrants have also taken home the top award plenty of times before.
