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2016 was a pretty good year for FX as five wins at the Primetime Emmys for The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story helped it to a total 18 gongs at the 68th Emmy Awards.
Eight years on, with new owners in the shape of The Walt Disney Company, it was an even better night for John Landgraf’s team.
FX won 36 awards across Primetime Emmys and the Creative Arts Awards, helped by record breaking showings for Shōgun and The Bear.
It was FX’s best ever Emmy performance and its most significant since the night Courtney B. Vance, Sarah Paulson, Sterling K. Brown picked up awards for the Ryan Murphy-created limited series, as well as a win for Baskets’ Louie Anderson.
The network managed to break the hegemony of HBO and Netflix, which have been battling it out for most wins since the Reed Hastings-founded company entered original programming over a decade ago.
It was a victory lap for Disney, which picked up a total of 60 wins across both weekends, including 51 Creative Arts Emmys, something that Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman Dana Walden said was “unbelievable”.
Before the show, Disney CEO Bob Iger lauded Landgraf and his team.
“We have a lot of executives who work with the creative community who have done an extraordinary job of sourcing material and working with a creative community to get the best out of them,” Iger said on the pre-show.
Iger particularly talked up the success of Shōgun but admitted that the company had to question it given it’s big-budget. “It’s relatively costly, almost all [in] Japanese, not even current Japanese. But John is just such a great executive as is his team, and he pretty much guaranteed that it was going to be great. He believes in big, which is really important. It’s a saga. It’s not only noise worthy, it’s newsworthy. I love the guts,” he added.
It is above the single-year record for a company that was set by CBS in 1974, thanks to big wins for M*A*S*H, The Carol Burnett Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Waltons, Kojak, All In The Family and Columbo, and Netflix, thanks to strong performances from The Crown and The Queen’s Gambit. However, it’s tough to compare Disney Entertainment, which includes wins for FX, Hulu and National Geographic, to either of these single service platforms.
FX had already broken records going into the Primetime Emmys. Shōgun won 14 awards during the two-day Creative Arts portion, which was higher than the previous record of HBO’s John Adams, which won 13 in one year, and HBO’s Game of Thrones, which had won 12, before even entering the Primetime Awards.
It only added to this with the main drama win, Anna Sawai, who plays Mariko taking home best drama actress award, Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Lord Yoshii Toranaga, winning best drama actor.
The Bear also broke its own record for most wins for a comedy series in a single year with 11. The Chicago-set series previously held the record with 10. It went into the Primetime Awards with seven awards, including wins for guest stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Jon Bernthal, and picked up a further four including best comedy and wins for Jeremy Allen White, Liza Colón-Zayas, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as well as Chris Storer for directing, although Ayo Edebiri lost out to Hacks‘ Jean Smart, and the HBO Max comedy somewhat surprisingly nabbed the top comedy award.
Lamorne Morris also won for his role as North Dakota Deputy Witt Farr in Fargo. Morris picked up the award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie in somewhat of a surprise with much of the early money on Robert Downey Jr. winning for The Sympathizer or Jonathan Bailey triumphing for Fellow Travelers.
It was also a solid performance for Netflix, which scored big wins for shows including Baby Reindeer, Ripley and The Crown. Baby Reindeer won the limited series prize as well as wins for Jessica Gunning, who played stalker Martha, and Gadd for performing and writing. Ripley won for directing and Elizabeth Debicki won for her portrayal of Princess Diana in The Crown.
Elsewhere, Peacock also picked up its first top series prize with a win for The Traitors, which managed to top RuPaul’s Drag Race. The streamer has won some smaller awards, but it was a solid win for NBCU.
It was, however, not the best year for HBO and its sister streamer Max. In the last decade, it has only been bested in total number of Emmy wins this year, by FX this year, and by Netflix in 2021. It did manage to win the top comedy prize with Hacks and pick up Primetime wins in the shape of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Jean Smart for Hacks, which also picked up the writing award, and Jodie Foster for True Detective: Night Country.
It came into the evening with eight Creative Arts wins for shows such as Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, which won the Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking award, and a choreography win for its much-criticized pop drama The Idol. But it didn’t have the volume, particularly in the Outstanding Series categories, where it only had Hacks and Curb Your Enthusiasm in comedy, The Gilded Age in drama and True Detective: Night Country in limited, the fewest number of shows in those three categories in 30 years.
HBO will be back; last year’s writers and actors strikes delayed many of its awards darlings such as The White Lotus and The Last of Us. The end of the much-lauded Succession didn’t help, and The Regime and The Sympathizer couldn’t break into the main conversation and there’s been no Emmy love for the growing popularity of Industry.
John Landgraf and his team, as well as potentially his boss Dana Walden, will celebrating tonight at The Music Center in Downtown LA, an apt venue given how on song FX was this Emmys season.
