The most sought-after prize in television series includes 23 major nomination categories such as Outstanding Lead, Guest and Supporting Actors, as well as Outstanding Comedy, Drama and Reality Series. The 16 Netflix nominees were split between some of the most viewed series of this season: “House of Cards,” with Kevin Spacey, “A Very Murray Christmas,” with Bill Murray, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “Master of None,” and “Bloodline.” Amazon’s series followed up with six nominations with the critically acclaimed, transgender-struggle inspired comedy “Transparent.” Surprisingly enough, Hulu did not get any nomination, as the remaining two went to Jerry Seinfeld’s new comedy “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” hosted on Crackle, and to the independently distributed “Horace and Pete.”
All the remaining nominations went to cable and broadcast networks, with HBO claiming the largest hoard with 94 total nominations. As expected, most of those went to its most successful TV series “Game of Thrones,” that peaked an outstanding 8.89 million viewers across all platforms on the season 6 finale. FX came in next with 19 major nominations, followed by ABC with 12, NBC with 11, and Showtime and CBS with 8. In an interesting turn of events, USA Network managed to grab two major nominations for the convincing hacker-nerd drama “Mr. Robot.”
Although many claim cable technology is becoming obsolete, the road before streaming shows can really dominate mainstream media is still very long. But why did Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and the other streaming giants only grabbed less than a fifth of the awards provided by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences? The answer is quite simple: because as large as they may seem, they only offer just a fraction of the total shows provided by traditional media. Cable, broadcast, and streaming platforms aired a grand total of 409 scripted shows last year, with streaming ones airing just 44. So tweaking a little with math, we can see that despite the fact that streaming shows are just 10 percent of the total ones aired each year, they got 20 percent of the major Emmy nominations. Not a bad result from this perspective.
