Emmys Expand Drama and Comedy Categories to Include More Nominees
The Television Academy is restructuring its categories for the 72nd Emmy Awards as the number of submissions increased by 15% over last year’s competition.
To better represent the fantastic pool of possible nominees, the Academy is going to allow the nominations in each category to reflect the amount of submissions made for the 2020 ceremony. This means that the number of nominees per category will be based on the number of submissions in each category.
“The increase in submissions is a reflection of the number of new voices, new television platforms and a tremendous growth in content from existing platforms across our industry,” said Television Academy Chairman and CEO Frank Scherma in a statement. “Despite production suspension resulting from COVID-19, there is a wealth of excellent work submitted for this year’s competition.”
In a table released by the Academy, nominations will be based on the following submissions criteria: 1-19 submissions will result in a sliding scale between 0 and 4 nominations. 20-80 submissions are equivalent to 5 nominations, 81-60 submissions will result in 6 nominations, 161-240 submissions will yield 7 nominations and any category with more than 240 submissions will result in 8 nominations.
(Credit: Emmys)
Regardless of these scales, Comedy and Drama categories are automatically being expanded to include eight nominations each. Categories including Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress in Comedy and Drama will have parity in the number of nominations, according to the academy.
Along with this news, it was also revealed that this format will now eliminate a preexisting rule which specified that in categories with five nominees, if the fifth and sixth most-voted submissions are within 2% of each other, both would be nominated.
For those more interested in the rules that will be implemented for this year’s ceremony, the Academy encourages them to view the full list on their site. The 72nd Emmy Awards have been scheduled for September and will be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. Stay tuned for more details as the ceremony’s date nears.
72nd Emmy Awards, Sunday, September 20, 8/7c, ABC
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