How ‘Severance’ and ‘The Last of Us’ could rewrite the Emmy history books for sci-fi
Can Apple TV+'s Severance or HBO's The Last of Us win Best Drama Series? For most of Emmy history, the answer to that question would be no. That's because they're science-fiction shows, which have historically been under-appreciated by voters and thus underrepresented at the Emmys. Only one sci-fi show has ever won Best Drama Series: Lost in 2005. That was 20 years ago, but the TV Academy has changed drastically in the intervening years.
Some of the most beloved shows in TV history are sci-fi or fantasy, including Star Trek and Doctor Who that have been around for almost as long as TV has existed. But Emmy winners for drama series usually follow real-world professionals like doctors (Marcus Welby, M.D.; ER), lawyers (The Defenders, L.A. Law, The Practice), and police officers (Dragnet, Police Story, Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue). Even as those procedural genres started falling out of fashion in the 21st century (The Wire, one of the most revered cop shows in TV history, wasn't arresting enough for voters), the subjects that replaced them were still couched in reality: politics (The West Wing), organized crime (The Sopranos, Breaking Bad), advertising (Mad Men), and corporate warfare (Succession).
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Over the years, genre shows sometimes earned nominations for the top prize, but they were always the exception, never the rule. And they never won. The Twilight Zone (nominated 1961) and the original Star Trek (1967, 1968) made inroads in the earlier years of the Emmys, and later came Quantum Leap (1990-92), Star Trek: The Next Generation (1994), and The X-Files (1995-98). Most of those shows won Emmys in other categories, but they never took Best Drama Series despite their enduring cultural impact.
Lost changed things. Debuting in 2004, the ABC drama followed a group of plane crash survivors stranded on a mysterious deserted island. In 2005, it bested the western Deadwood, the funeral home family drama Six Feet Under, the counter-terrorism thriller 24, and the aforementioned presidential drama The West Wing. Curse broken! Sci-fi welcome! Well, not exactly. Though Lost broke the glass ceiling, it was also illustrative of the Academy's skittishness around the genre.
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The 2000s were a period of experimentation for the Emmys, and in 2006, shows had to submit sample episodes just to be nominated. The result: Lost was dropped from Best Drama Series entirely (the snub was referenced in host Conan O'Brien's cold open). The show didn't return to the lineup until 2008. It closed out its six-season run with two final noms in 2009 and 2010, but it never came close to matching the success of that first year. Lost leaned more heavily into its sci-fi elements as it progressed, so one could argue that voters still weren't taking the genre seriously enough.
The tipping point for genre shows may have been Game of Thrones — and a change in the voting procedure. That epic fantasy series started off slow at the Emmys; its first season won a scant two awards in 2011 for supporting actor Peter Dinklage and its main title sequence. It didn't win Best Drama Series until 2015 for its fifth season. That was the same year that the Emmys switched to the popular vote, allowing members to vote in all program categories and their respective branch categories. Previously, the Emmys used the tape system, in which nominees submitted episodes for select groups of around 80 voters to watch and vote. After that change and win, Game of Thrones, then the biggest show on TV, became unstoppable, winning again in 2016, 2018, and 2019, and thereby tying Mad Men, Hill Street Blues, The West Wing, and L.A. Law for the most Best Drama Series wins in history. It ultimately collected more trophies overall (59) than any other scripted drama or comedy series ever.
Sci-fi is still waiting for its Game of Thrones moment, but there have been signs that voters' hearts have thawed when it comes to the genre. Sci-fi programs are now common in the Best Drama Series category, with four nominations to date for Stranger Things (2017, 2018, 2020, 2022), two for Westworld (2017, 2018), two for The Mandalorian (2020, 2021) and one for Andor (2023). Also helping is the fact that the category has gradually expanded beyond the typical five slots over the years. It's been fixed fixed at eight slots since 2020. The more shows that are nominated, the more visibility they get.
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Which brings us to Severance and The Last of Us, one of which might finally follow Lost into the winner's circle for Best Drama Series. Both are already Emmy winners. Severance, about a secretive company that splits the consciousness of its employees between work life and home life, debuted to critical acclaim in 2022 and earned 14 Emmy noms that year, including Best Drama Series. It only won two awards, for its main title sequence and music composition, but the long three-year gap between seasons (partly the result of the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023) doesn't seem to have put off critics or audiences. Season 2 premiered on Jan. 17 and scored 86 on Metacritic, and now it's the odds-on favorite for Best Drama Series, with no indication that its unique premise will hold it back. Most of the expert journalists we've surveyed are betting on it to prevail.
The Last of Us, a zombie apocalypse series about a fungal infection that spread across the globe, is based on the video game of the same name, and it did even better in its first season. In 2023, it picked up a whopping 24 Emmy nominations, including Best Drama Series. Out of those, it won eight, all at the Creative Arts Emmys, but it was Succession that took top honors for a third and final time. The Last of Us is slated to return April 13, so we have yet to see if critics will back it up to the same extent as Severance. But even sight unseen it ranks second in our odds for Best Drama Series. Lost opened the door for these shows to even be considered as formidable as they are. The castaways walked so they could run.
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