“Comedy’s where the real drama is,” Matt Noble concludes at the end of the Gold Derby contributors’ slugfest that I hosted after the 2019 Emmy nominations announcement on Tuesday. He identifies “Barry,” “Fleabag,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Veep” as “the four series that have a legitimate case to be made for the Comedy Series winner.” The competitiveness of the Best Comedy Series race contrasts that of Best Drama Series. “No one could even break into double digits,” Charlie Bright observes about the nomination hauls of the challengers to “Game of Thrones.” Noble adds, “It’s a shame it got so many nominations at the expense of some other worthy contenders from other series and it’s taken a bit out of the suspense out of Best Drama Series, at least for now, unless us procrastinating, prognosticating minds can machinate some different theories over the next couple of months.”
Zach Laws identifies “Barry” as the new Best Comedy Series front-runner over “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” because the latter got “no Writing nomination and it just won that last year.” “PEN15” is a new comedy that is nominated in its place, to which Laws laughs, “I had never heard of the show and apparently, neither had the Emmy website because they didn’t even have a photo of it up, so hand it to those wacky writers to always keep surprising us.” Tony Ruiz retorts, “I love that show.” Luca Giliberti, who has written some 90 articles for the Gold Derby blog since having the second-best predictions last year, again ranks in the top 10. “What we saw now this year is that name-check isn’t everything,” Giliberti takes away from the nominations, noting that big names were snubbed for breakthrough performances in “what people are actually watching — what they’re liking.”
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