A column chronicling events and conversations on the awards circuit.
The Primetime Emmys nominating ballot is live, voting began yesterday, and all this phase one voting, FYC events, and furious jockeying for attention by seemingly every member of the White Lotus cast is coming to a head. Meanwhile the official ballot brought the sad confirmation, as reported by Deadline, that in the Outstanding Talk Series there were only 13 entries, one short of triggering a 14th nomination so that means there will be only 3 nominees this year and thus you are only allowed to vote for 3. The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert were nominated in the category last year, as they all were the year before, with Daily Show winning both times (including with past host, Trevor Noah). One of them, along with 9 other hopefuls on a list that also includes The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Real Time With Bill Maher, and John Mulaney’s weekly Netflix series are in danger of being blanked in the once robust category. This continues to cause annual consternation among those in Late Night, but if I were still on the Board Of Governors (as I was for 6 years representing the Writers Branch) I would just simply vote to set a minimum number of 4 nominees and a maximum number of 5 and be done with it.
Therefore knowing the dwindling odds here, and the fact that no broadcast network series has even managed a single win since Late Show With David Letterman in 2002 (from 2003 it has been either Daily Show in various incarnations, a couple for Colbert Report, both Comedy Central, or HBO’s stranglehold with Last Week With John Oliver which finally was forced to move to Scripted Variety Series where it now beats SNL), late nighter’s are hedging their bets and also trying to find refuge – and Emmys – in the Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama, Variety Series category. On this ballot there are 14 entries this year triggering 4 nominations. Of those 14, more than one third of them come from Late Night: Overtime With Bill Maher; Late Night With Seth Meyers: Corrections; The Tonight Show During Commercial Break; The Daily Show: Desi Lydic Foxsplains, and the brand new entry, The Rabbit Hole With Jimmy Kimmel.
Watch on Deadline
As opposed to Fallon’s Tonight Show cleverly trying to win an Emmy for their commercial breaks since for years they haven’t been able to get nominated for what is actually on the show itself, Kimmel’s shorts called The Rabbit Hole With Jimmy Kimmel are satirical takeoffs on various conspiracy theories. They are produced outside the series itself under the guidance of JKL executive producer and head writer Molly McNearney and writer/producer Jesse Joyce, both of whom joined me on a zoom earlier this week to talk about the concept that debuted on the JKL You Tube channel a couple of months ago. McNearney explained that Joyce, also a writer for the series, constantly pitched the idea of this bit parodying video podcasters who peddle political conspiracies, but there was just no time in a monologue segment to do it justice, thus the spinoff to the internet.
“Jesse is an impeccable, meticulous researcher, and he’s often trying to get bits like this into our show. Unfortunately, we don’t have time for a six-minute conspiracy bit in our monologues,” McNearney told me. “But we really wanted this to live, and the best place for it is online, for two reasons. One, that’s where we have the space for it, and two, that’s where these conspiracies live. Jesse was very passionate about writing these and putting them together and Jimmy was excited to parody these conspiracy theorists online, and you know, at a time where we have a president who speaks in conspiracy theories, it felt like a very significant time to parody.”
The premiere episode dealt with cellular network technology that travels a path to tying 5G to Obama, Five Guys to the band Toto, and Tanya Harding to cell tower provider Crown Castle. Kimmel’s tag line is “I’m just asking questions” and it leads to wild, but meticulously researched places such as tying the Moderna vaccine to Auntie Em from The Wizard Of Oz, or the size of Elon Musk’s “tiny testicles” to a line Nixon says on the Watergate tapes describing someone as “a little nuts”. To do that Joyce went through the Watergate tapes and stumbled on to that one line as – Voila! – a connect the dots moment of absurdity. Time travel, Windmills, waffle houses and more are other starting points for going down the ‘rabbit hole’ with long and winding crazy conspiracy theories. “Don’t believe anything you hear – unless you hear it from me”, Kimmel says at the end of every episode.
Taking an average of 2 full 10 hour days just to connect the dots and do the extensive research, Joyce claims they are easy and dumb but that he can make a plausible argument out of anything. “If you go deep enough, because it’s like the whole thing with conspiracies is just taking something random and small and just assigning tremendous value to it,” he says. “If you allow your brain to do that, you can make all kinds of spurious connections to nonsense, and yeah, and my head just kind of does that. The way they work is you have to lay a lot of track to get the fullest effect,” at which point McNearney noted you can take information and manipulate people very easily, you can just kind of make “truth” out of anything. A recent example would be Trump reposting some MAGA supporter’s theory that Joe Biden was executed years ago and it was really a robot running the country as President Biden.
Joyce points out conspiracy theories have been around throughout history by people ill-informed on just about everything. “Now, because of Twitter and YouTube and everything I have to hear about it all day long, from all these morons. It feels overwhelming, like they’re everywhere, but I feel like there have always been just as many conspiracy dingbats,” he says.
McNearney says their You Tube channel has 21 million subscribers and a lot of viewers are watching their show, or parts of it, online so viewing habits have really changed. “The priority, every day, is to put all the best material on our show, but we also know that a lot of people are watching it on their phones, and they’re not watching an hourlong show at home on the couch anymore. So, we are trying to make it as easy to digest as possible online, and we do it with our monologue and the best moments of our guest interviews,” she said. “And then something like Rabbit Hole gets to live entirely online, which we think is where it belongs, you know, at the center of misinformation, the internet.”
Check out a recent episode of The Rabbit Hole below:
As for a possible Emmy for this? “I mean, you never know with these categories. There’s so many different categories out there, but it’s good to start thinking outside of just Emmys for broadcasters, a lot of opportunity there. So, we’re grateful,” she said. “But It would really be great if Jimmy won an Emmy for conspiracy theories, you know?”
JULIANNE NICHOLSON IS HOLDING A HOT HAND FOR EMMYS
Speaking of conspiracy theories how is this for one? Julianne Nicholson is really Jack Nicholson’s daughter. Actually that is not so far fetched as the other above mentioned crazy conspiracies on the internet. I mean I am asked sometimes if I come from the Hammond Organ empire. So on our recent zoom I was curious if she was indeed asked a lot if she was related to the most famous Nicholson of them all. “Probably more so in the first decade,” she told me. “but you know, not as much as you would think, actually. And you know my answer? I would say if I was related to Jack Nicholson, you would’ve heard of me a long time ago.”
Great answer, and one this Emmy winner (for Mare Of Easttown) certainly doesn’t have to use much these days. A lot of people have definitely heard of Julianne Nicholson in her three decade career, and this year she is having quite a season with lots of awards buzz for not one, but two genuine shots at nominations. As the cheekily named Dance Mom thrust into instant TV fame, and not quite ready for it, in Hacks, Nicholson is a good bet in the Guest Actress in a Comedy Series category, while her role as the duplicitous tech mogul in Paradise is getting lots of talk about a Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. Of course she is no stranger to the Emmys. She already has one for her moving role as Lori Ross in 2021’s Limited Series, Mare Of Easttown as Supporting Actress in a Limited Series, Movie or Anthology. A double win this year would land her Emmys in all three different acting categories, a feat that certainly confirms her versatility as an actor who can switch from genre to genre and drama to comedy with a great deal of success. But let’s not jump ahead of ourselves. The nominations have to come first and that would be the same kind of testament to Nicholson’s prodigious talents, as if we already didn’t know this.
In terms of the roles, she really loved being asked to do such a wild character on Hacks, and has her “Dance Mom” figured out. “I think she just wants to dance, to start, but I think there is something a little unfulfilled in her, and she is just ill-equipped to deal with, you know, the trappings, and that was what was so much fun, to be able to do so…you know, that arc, that very extreme arc, happens in three pretty short episodes,” she said. “You see the whole roller coaster for her, and I just think those creators, those writers, they’re just so smart and fearless about what they ask of their storytelling and their actors to do, and it just always pays off, as far as I can tell.”
As for the extreme physicality required for this comedic turn? “I’m glad you mentioned that, actually, because it was one of the things I loved about it, to use my body in that way, because it’s true. Normally, I feel like my work is sort of, I don’t know, heart-centered or head-centered, and so, to be able to just let loose in your body, in that way, was so fun, and it is exhausting. I cannot imagine how Lucille Ball did that so many times. I mean, I was beat after three episodes,” she laughed.
And she also really got to switch gears by playing a villain, a rare female villain in Paradise in which she co-stars with Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden. It has been renewed for a second season. “Again, it’s so fun to play something like I’ve never done before. You know, when you’ve been doing it for a couple of decades, almost three, now, you wonder if maybe you’re going to have to start repeating yourself, and it’s so nice to keep getting to explore new types of characters. I thought Dan (Fogelman, the creator) was so smart in introducing her backstory so early on in the season. For me to be able to have an understanding of where she came from, but also, obviously, for the audience to have a little bit more, hopefully, empathy or understanding. I mean, of course, she goes to the extreme, but there’s a little bit more of why she is who she is when we meet her in present-day Paradise. I loved it. I think she’s fascinating,” Nicholson says about the character nicknamed Sinatra. “I think that it’s fun to be the boss. It’s fun to be the most powerful person in the room. It’s fun to be all those things without having to be over the top, or physically intimidatingor raising your voice. It was fun to sort of go around and find other ways I could bring that sort of power and maybe nefariousness, Is that even a word, to that character.”
Yes that is a word, and also she is showing us a tech billionaire as villain, something that in the past few months has been increasingly emulated in the world for real, more than ever, but Nicholson said it wasn’t what they were thinking. “None of what’s happening now was even on our minds when we were actually making it, and to have it sort of be playing out is definitely alarming, to say the least. I think they surpass even, you know, our entertainment.”
Nicholson also is really happy about the names of these two characters this season. “I think I have the two best names of the season, between Dance Mom and Sinatra,” she happily proclaims. “They’re both names that people have latched onto. Like, the name is a very big part of the character, for each of these people, which is not always the case. So, that’s been really interesting, too. You think it could be many things, but ultimately, I think it was the president’s dad, Cal’s dad, who said that I’m like Sinatra because his son, President Cal, was like Peter Lawford (Sinatra’s Rat Pack friend and co-star). He’s the one that nobody takes seriously, right? He’s, like, for the ride. He’s just one of the pack, but Sinatra, when she comes in the room, everyone’s eyes are on her. Everyone pays attention.”
So she is halfway through shooting season 2 but isn’t sure how it ends, but the show is planned for a 3 season arc and she is on board for anything. Nicholson certainly is busy as she also plays a top CIA head in the feature film, The Amateur with Rami Malek, and completed a BBC series, Dope Girls in England where she lives. She hopes that one finds its way to the U.S. as well.