Blessed be the comeback? ‘The Handmaid's Tale' is on track to return to this major Emmy category for final season
Up until the fifth season, the Hulu series had fielded at least one nominee in the category each time it was eligible. For the first season in 2017, it landed a lone nomination for Alexis Bledel, who prevailed. The following year, it tripled its Season 1 total with bids for Kelly Jenrette, Cherry Jones, and eventual winner Samira Wiley. While it wasn't eligible for a full season in 2019, it was allowed to enter the final three outings of Season 2 as orphaned episodes and occupied a slot with Jones, who gave the show its third straight victory in the category. For the third season in 2020, it picked up another mention for Bledel, who was also cited alongside Mckenna Grace for the fourth season in 2021. Grace was eligible again for the fifth season two years later, but she was likely hurt by the general apathy toward the season, which earned 20 fewer noms than the prior one.
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This year, Handmaid's has double the chance to return to the category, fielding two contenders in Jones and Season 6 addition . Of the two, only the former is currently expected to crack the six-person lineup, sitting in fifth place in Gold Derby's odds, but that's not surprising. A five-time nominee and three-time winner — including a second time in this category, for Succession in 2020 — Jones is an Emmy fave, and she's already been recognized for her role on the series. As Holly, June's (Moss) activist mother who was presumed dead but turns up alive in one of Season 6's most shocking moments, she gets her best material yet in the show's farewell installment, and has the benefit of not just sharing most of her scenes with Moss but having the bulk of her screen time in the first two episodes. Though certainly not a new name to Emmy voters as a previous nominee herself, for The Good Place in 2020, Carden faces a bigger hurdle as a late cast addition who also doesn't make her first appearance until the seventh episode of the final season, meaning voters have to have stuck around until the end to see her performance. But if they did, they ought to have been impressed by her fierce turn as Ava, a CIA operative working undercover as an Aunt in Gilead to help take down the totalitarian theocracy from within.
SEE D'Arcy Carden on her 'dream come true' joining 'The Handmaid's Tale' and Phoebe's 'different Aunt energy'
The big question for both actresses is whether Handmaid's can rebound after almost being shut out for its fifth season. Though it's made a massive comeback before, nabbing a series-high 21 bids for its fourth season after dipping to what was at the time a series-low 10 for its third, it did so under different circumstances. Not only was the show aiming to recover from a considerably higher nomination total that notably still included a drama series nom, but it did so in a wide-open year for drama that was littered with ineligibilities due to the pandemic. This year's field is much more crowded, with multiple returning heavy-hitters, including The Last of Us, The White Lotus, Squid Game, and Severance, as well as several breakout hits, including The Pitt and Hulu stablemate Paradise, in contention.
But what Handmaid's has going for it is timing. Much like the third season, which aired in the summer of 2019, the fifth one aired in the first half of the eligibility window, from September to November 2022, likely making it a distant memory by the time voting began the following June. For its final season, the dystopian drama returned to its usual mid-spring slot, having premiered with three episodes on April 8. Its series finale dropped on May 27, just a little over two weeks before voting opened on June 12, which means the show was probably top of mind for TV Academy members as they marked off their ballots. Of course, that's assuming they were caught up on the series by then, but if its streaming numbers for the week of the finale are anything to go by, there's little reason to believe they weren't.
Bolstered by its best reviews since Season 2, the show has also received a renewed push from both critics and its streamer in the home stretch. Though final-season narratives don't always pan out at the Emmys (ask This Is Us, which was expected to make a big splash for its sixth and final season but wound up with just a single bid for one of its original songs), Handmaid's can flaunt a unique legacy. Not only has it changed the game for streaming shows at the Emmys as the first one to win a series prize, but it has also permeated real-life politics, with the red cloaks and white bonnets worn by the namesake concubines on the series having become international protest symbols in the fight for women's rights and reproductive freedom.
Even if that legacy isn't enough for Handmaid's to make a full-scale comeback, it may suffice to push it back into the acting categories, in which it's historically performed well, earning 28 of its 76 total nominations and six of its 15 wins there. Of this year's acting races, Best Drama Guest Actress is arguably the most unsettled one, with only the top four in the odds — The Last of Us duo Kaitlyn Dever and Catherine O'Hara, and Severance's Gwendoline Christie and Merritt Wever — being safe bets for noms. Hilary Swank is in sixth place for Yellowjackets, but the Paramount+ with Showtime series hasn't exactly been a hit with the acting branch and has to overcome the polarizing reception to its eligible third installment. So if voters looked to fill the final few slots on their ballots, they may have just gone back to one of their former faves in the category and sent Handmaid's some good weather one last time.
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