Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers… Who’s Getting Voted Off Emmy Island?

If it seems like the late-night shows competing for Outstanding Talk Series are falling over each other for your consideration this year, there’s a good reason for it.

This is the last week for those credentialled enough in the television business to participate in the Television Academy’s Emmy nomination-round voting—and per the organization’s somewhat confounding rules, this year there will be only three nominees in the late-night talk category that just two years ago housed five.

If we assume that perennial Emmy favorite Jon Stewart is a lock, and that there’s a more than reasonable chance that one of those precious two remaining spots goes to John Mulaney (who is carrying around the brand of “innovator” in the format), that leaves the likes of Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers (among seven others) all battling it out for the single remaining nomination.

Famously, the current group of high-profile hosts have all moved beyond the back-stabbing, nail-clawing competition of the past, and are actually all good friends, appearing on each others’ shows and even doing a podcast together during the WGA and SAG strikes. (Guys, where’s the fun in that?)

But in the awards area, there remains—here and there, at least—an isolated bared fang of the old competitiveness.

They may accept that Jon Stewart is going to win again (because historically he almost always has). But the ignominy of a network franchise show not even being nominated? That will not stand.

Part of the blame for this stems from the fact that the category that once included all the traditional late-night shows was cleaved in two a few years back.

Some are now housed in the “Scripted Variety” category, which includes some pretty obvious late-night-ish shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, After Midnight with Taylor Tomlinson, and Saturday Night Live alongside other shows like HBO’s Fantasmas and It’s Florida, Man, and Studio C, the comedy sketch show on Brigham Young University TV.

While this move did solve one seeming inequity—Oliver’s once-a-week, comedic issue-oriented show was winning every year against the four-night-a-week comedy late-night shows—it created a crazy situation with the near-certainty that this year, like last year, Oliver and SNL will be all alone in category of two. (Oliver won yet again last year.)

Meanwhile, the high-profile network late-night programs, and others like The Daily Show, Mulaney’s Everybody’s Live, Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, CNN’s Have I Got News for You, and web series Hot Ones and Very Important People, remain in the talk category.

But the total number of submitted shows in “Talk” is 13, down from 14 last year, which, per the Academy’s nomination algorithm is what knocked the number of nominees down from four last year to three this year.

It’s become a game of musical chairs with the music ending ever more abruptly and the chairs disappearing even faster.

The voters deciding which shows make it have been told to pick three of the thirteen possibilities.

The reason late-night shows have had such a presence in American life is because they are on (relatively speaking) all the time. Yes, they’ve all dropped doing original shows on Fridays, but they still produce four shows a week more often than not.

How many Emmy voters see even a fraction of those hundreds of episodes for the network franchise shows?

That means the moments that stand out during a season have to somehow find their way into voters’ consciousness.

It is surely easier for an outstanding and outspoken show like Last Week Tonight to make a once-a-week impression.

The same advantage probably goes to The Daily Show now, because Jon Stewart’s Monday-only appearances are clearly the show’s high cards. And to Mulaney, whose show was not only weekly, it was only on 12 times the whole season.

Surely that’s part of what has the network shows so hungry for Emmy recognition. One the bright side, the stark reality that so many will lose seems to have livened up the competition.

At least two of the contenders went all out, conceding they are courting the voters with special events and vilifying each other, face-to-face on the air.

Of course that was just a joke… Or was it?

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