Who Will Be This Year’s Emmy Villain?

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The awards-season villain is almost as important as the ceremony itself. It’s a galvanizing force for people who pay attention to awards races, helping to provide at least one overarching narrative for what might otherwise seem like a chaotic and haphazard competition. The Oscars always have a villain — sometimes more than one. Vulture’s own Nate Jones has extensively chronicled the journeys of the designated Oscar villains over the years, coming up with a handy rubric to determine why Bradley Cooper’s hyperearnest immersion into a subject is good for A Star Is Born but villainous in Maestro.

Nate’s three-pronged criteria for awards villainy is perfectly calibrated for the Oscars, but to suit the Emmys, we need to make a few tweaks. An Oscar villain (either a film or a singular performance) usually needs to have debuted to much acclaim at one of the fall festivals and immediately get pegged by awards-watchers as a major Best Picture contender. There is no festival season from which Emmy contenders can emerge with the kind of hype that ultimately leads to a backlash. But we can make the argument that critical hype for previous seasons of Emmy-nominated shows, along with prior TV Academy recognition, is a comparable metric and amounts to Major Contender status for past juggernauts like Succession.

After the festivals, Nate explains that Oscar villains often go on to premiere to a divisive reaction among the actual viewing public. But crucially, they retain “the imprimatur of awards-season success,” and “a consensus emerges among detractors that the film needs to be taken down a peg.” This can also happen to TV shows, when a critical consensus emerges early only for viewers at home to start piling on the Anointed One once they’ve had a chance to binge it. Furthermore, Oscar villains can catch flack for failing to meet not just artistic standards but political ones too. “Often, this opinion emerges from a disparity in values between Twitter progressivism and Hollywood progressivism, and while you can absolutely make valid critiques of both, only one of them gave Best Picture to Green Book.” The Emmys don’t have a Green Book in their history books, but they did give Outstanding Drama to 24 five seasons into its run.

With all this in mind, let’s count down the contenders for 2024 Emmy villain:

If you’re watching the Emmys this year and wondering where the usual bevy of HBO shows are, David Zaslav is the man you’re looking for. Boiled down to its essence, an Emmy villain first needs to hold some perceived power, and as the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, he certainly qualifies. His status as an avatar of the studios during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and his role in annihilating projects like Batgirl and Coyote vs. ACME, in addition to that $49.7 million salary he collected in 2023, have turned him into the suit at whom you want to throw tomatoes. The one thing keeping him from the No. 1 spot on this list is that it’s hard to grasp any one specific thing he’s responsible for at this year’s Emmys. “HBO’s general downturn” is definitely his fault, but it’s both too big and too vague a notion to support a villain narrative.

The Reality TV categories make for great Emmy villains because the same shows keep winning, and nothing cultivates awards-show villainy better than a carbon-copied winners list year after year. Drag Race has won Outstanding Reality Competition five out of the last six years, a span of time in which the extended Drag Race universe has become so massive with international iterations and All-Stars seasons and “Luxembourg Versus the World” specials that a certain level of exhaustion kicked in. And with new blood like The Traitors entering the category, you could see a scenario where Drag Race becomes the entrenched old villain keeping the upstart young show down. There’s also the fact that RuPaul himself has always been low-key politically problematic, what with the fracking and all. Ultimately, though, Drag Race remains too popular and drag itself too politically under fire from the MAGA crowd to ever truly fit the bill.

It’s less of a thing now that the line between movies and TV has blurred beyond recognition. But an actress of Meryl Streep’s stature still retains the status of movie star, which means she does unavoidably seem like she’s slumming it when she gets nominated for an Emmy. It feels like Streep has an unfair advantage in Supporting Actress in a Comedy because it’s assumed that Emmy voters will be dazzled by the World’s Finest Actress. What’s keeping Meryl from being a true Emmy villain is twofold: For one, her performance in Only Murders in the Building was great and critically lauded; for another, once the new season of Hacks premiered and Hannah Einbinder’s Emmy campaign began in earnest, she subsumed Meryl’s status as front-runner. It’s tough to mark someone as the villain when they’re not the center of the conversation.

RDJ has all the movie-star cachet of Meryl Streep — perhaps even more so, since Streep’s reputation is Actress Extraordinaire while Downey is the center of Marvel’s billion-upon-billion-dollar superhero enterprise. But while Streep’s performance was well received, Downey’s turn as multiple characters in The Sympathizer was more divisive among critics, many of whom found it showy bordering on showboaty. And, as our Roxana Hadadi noted, the fact that he’s a white nominee from a show about a Northern Vietnamese man struggling to live revolutionary ideals is an eyebrow-raiser. He’s also just coming off of an Oscar win, which checks the “pre-hyped” box on his villain scorecard. But while The Sympathizer might not have Emmy watchers hooting and hollering for RDJ to get another trophy, his Oscar win did represent a wave of goodwill for the actor, and it’s hard to imagine an en masse turn on him so quickly. I suppose you could cast a win for Downey Jr. as a slight to the late Treat Williams, nominated for Capote vs. the Swans, but that’s about as heated as things could get.

The fact that Netflix’s massively popular limited series became the front-runner as soon as Shōgun switched to Drama makes it the tall poppy of the Limited Series categories. But it’s the persistence of the lawsuits against the show alleging defamation from the woman who says she’s the inspiration for its stalker character that could make the villain label stick. Working in Baby Reindeer’s favor is the fact there isn’t really a plucky rooting interest among its competition. True Detective: Night Country was too divisive, Fargo too long in the tooth, Ripley too chilly. An Emmy villain needs a corresponding Emmy hero, and Lessons in Chemistry sure ain’t it.

Okay, now we’re talking. The Morning Show pretty much jumps off of the page as an Emmy villain after even a cursory glance at the nominees. It’s everywhere. Four of the seven Supporting Actress in a Drama nominees. Three of the seven Supporting Actors. Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon in Lead Actress?? All for a show that is objectively bonkers. But after three seasons, The Morning Show has turned “bonkers” into a term of endearment from its oft-bewildered viewers. And while its politics have always been somewhat goofy, the worst label you can pin to it is “girlboss television,” and in the year of Kamala, a lotta folks are gonna let the girlboss stuff slide for a few months.

Speaking of politics! You could write a tome about the history of The Daily Show as it pertains to American political and civic discourse from the time Jon Stewart took over hosting duties in 1999 until now. And like many things that were lauded as heroes of the left during the George W. Bush administration, time has turned TDS and especially Stewart into avatars of the derided center-left. When Stewart returned to the show in early 2024, he did so as a far more divisive figure, and when Last Week Tonight With John Oliver departed the Talk Series category for Scripted Variety in 2023, The Daily Show resumed its former trend of domination in the category. One imagines the fans of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night With Seth Meyers, and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert are hoping voters might try something new (not to mention those of us who wanted John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A. or Hot Ones to give this category the shake-up it so desperately needs).

To be perfectly clear, Hacks is a far more popular series in the greater entertainment landscape than it is within the halls of Vulture. Any attempts to affix the villain label on that show would be erroneous. That said, within the context of awards, the dread specter of “category fraud” often presages villain status. This doesn’t just pertain to what does and doesn’t count as a comedy but also who does and doesn’t count as a lead or supporting performer. For each of Hacks’s three seasons, Hannah Einbinder has been submitted and nominated in Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy, despite being a textbook co-lead with Jean Smart. She’s arguably more of a lead than Smart, since Ava is the POV through which we enter Deborah’s world in the series. Running in the Supporting category puts Einbinder at an advantage since she has more story (and thus more material) to work with. Fraudulence in order to gain an advantage? That’s textbook villainy too. Dulling Einbinder’s case for premier Emmy villain is the fact that despite the category fraud, she still lost her two previous nominations (to Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham in 2021 and Abbott Elementary’s Sheryl Lee Ralph in 2022), though most Emmy observers give her the best odds to finally win this year.

Well, for one thing, it is exceedingly easy to cast the British royals in the role of villains in almost any setting, which automatically shoots The Crown up toward the top of our ranking. Even if Shōgun is predicted to win Outstanding Drama, The Crown still feels like an incumbent front-runner simply because this is its sixth nomination and it previously won in 2021. The show is seen as both past its prime (nobody seemed to like that final season very much) and politically problematic. Not to mention that Peter Morgan has long been accused of writing an apologia for the royal family, and the show came under repeated criticism for treating Diana unfairly in its final years.

If one show checks off all the boxes for Nate’s criteria, it’s The Bear. Let’s revisit:

1. The TV show is usually building off multiple seasons of acclaim, including previous Emmy nominations.

Not only did The Bear dominate the Comedy categories at last year’s Emmys, winning Outstanding Comedy Series, Lead Actor (Jeremy Allen White), Supporting Actress (Ayo Edebiri), Supporting Actor (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Writing, and Directing, it also picked up four SAG Awards, four Golden Globes, five Critics Choice Awards, two Independent Spirit Awards, two Producers Guild Awards, one Directors Guild Award, and a Peabody.

2. The show premieres to a divisive reaction among the public. But crucially, it retains the imprimatur of awards-season success. A consensus emerges among detractors that the show needs to be taken down a peg.

An emerging consensus that the show has to be taken down a peg? Check. One of the telltale signs of a backlash is that much of the tone adopts a “let’s all stop lying to ourselves and admit this thing is bad” narrative, and that’s exactly the tone that has pervaded reviews of The Bear season three.

3. There is the sense that the show is bad not just on an artistic level, but on a political one as well. 

On the surface, this condition wouldn’t seem to apply to The Bear. While the show has been dinged since its earliest days for having a blinkered or inaccurate depiction of its Chicago environs, that tends to matter most to critics from Chicago. But politics don’t always have to be national or even municipal, and I would argue that one of the biggest political questions within the TV industry right now is “Does The Bear qualify as a comedy?”. Our own Kathryn VanArendonk tackled this very question earlier this week, and it’s at the center of The Bear’s candidacy for Emmy villain status. For one thing, it has the sheen of fraud to it; there’s a sense that FX or The Bear’s producers are trying to get away with something by passing off the show as something it’s not to get ahead in the Emmys race. The Bear is a fraudulent comedy, goes this narrative, and anybody who says different is lying to you or to themselves.

This is a debate that surfaces every time the Golden Globes nominate a light drama in their comedy categories (some people are legit still mad about The Martian beating out Spy and Trainwreck in 2016), and it definitely comes up every time a half-hour series with heavy themes and dramatic execution gets nominated as a comedy at the Emmys. Showtime spent the better part of ten years making shows like Weeds, United States of Tara, and Nurse Jackie, all of which drove fans of “real” comedies up the wall. There’s also the not-inconsiderable fact that social media is about 90 percent comedy writers, and they all get really mad when “serious” comedies are seen as better than comedies that only want to make you laugh. That resentment tends to simmer behind the scenes and in private conversations, but when it finally starts to bubble up in frustrated tweets, like this one from an Abbott Elementary writer, you know that villain status has been achieved.

So The Bear is this year’s Emmy villain. The follow-up question, then, is this: So what? What does that mean for its chances to win? Oscar villains occasionally triumph (Green Book, Crash), but they usually don’t. La La Land fell to Moonlight, Avatar to The Hurt Locker, 1917 to Parasite. The thing about the Emmys is that the villain triumphs kind of a lot. Kind of all the time. Modern Family was an Emmy villain as early as its second season, and it won Outstanding Comedy four more times. Ted Lasso’s backlash-laden second season? More like Emmy-winning backlash-laden second season. Game of Thrones’s maligned final season: Emmy winner.

No one is expecting the frustration over The Bear’s category placement or the reviews for its third season to dampen voter enthusiasm for it, which will only enhance its villainy more. Disgruntled critics and social-media haters alike will be all the more vocally supportive of folks like What We Do in the Shadows’s Matt Berry or Comedy Series nominees like Reservation Dogs (a funnier show than The Bear but certainly one that also combines comedy and drama in a way that defies any calls for pure laughs in the category). And when The Bear wins anyway, they will boo and snark and tweet about what a laugh riot Carmy’s latest meltdown was.