The Emmy B-Team: Reality Shows

How bad are the Emmy nominations? This question comes up every year when the nominations are announced and everyone has a long list of snubs and shows that didn't deserve nominations. The way people talk about the nominations, you start to wonder if the Emmy voters have watched anything in the last year or if they are just rubber stamping the shows they picked the year before or choosing the last buzzy show they heard about. I certainly had that opinion. I still kind of do. That's was drove me to make what I call my Emmy B-Teams.

In case you are new to this, the idea is pretty straightforward. I go through the Emmy nomination ballot for a bunch of categories and put together the strongest group I can among what wasn't already nominated for the Emmy. I call this group my B-Team. I then compare the Nominees to my B-Team and choose a winner based on which is a stronger group of performers/shows/etc. The idea is to see how badly chosen the nominees actually are. This serves two purposed:
1) To see how bad the nominees really are. The first year I did this, my theory was that, as a very informed TV viewer, it would be easy for me to find 5-7 names that the Emmy voters missed. I'll go ahead and say now that the Emmy voters, especially outside the Comedy and Drama categories, tend to do a pretty good job picking most of the best options in a category.
2) To highlight some other great work from the last year. With the explosion of new content over the last few years, 5 or 6 nominees just isn't enough to cover all the great work being done, especially on lesser seen shows that have trouble putting together enough support to be nominated.

As far as who I pick for my B-Team, please disagree with me. I watch a lot of TV, but I miss much more than I see. My B-Team is exactly that: My B-Team. In other words, I'm stacking the deck in the B-Team's favor. If I'm picking the 5-6 shows that I like the best and the B-Team still loses, that means the Nominee list is pretty damn strong.

This is my weakest day of picking B-Teams. I don't watch much reality TV. I just don't enjoy watching much of it. My best guess why is that I prefer writing over editing and like knowing that an actor is playing a role more than assuming that some of it is authentic and some is staged. The categories today aren't very deeps with options, so expect a lot of sarcastic fun to be had with them.

(Final Note: I'm sure that I'll mention this more than a few times, but all my picks are based on who is submitted and in which category. For example, I would've considered the Halt and Catch Fire episode "The Threshold" a lock for my writing and directing by B-team, but it wasn't submitted. Thus, I can't include it. Similarly, Ted Danson would be a great supporting actor in a comedy contender on The Good Place. However, he submitted himself as a lead, so that's all I can consider him for)

Previously:
2014 Edition | 2015 Edition | 2016 Edition
Why You Should Dismiss the Emmys
The Scruff
 
* Indicates a show that I haven't watched this season.
# Indicates a show I've seen before, not this season.

Structured Reality Program

Nominees:

* Antiques Roadshow

* Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives

* Fixer Upper

# Lip Sync Battle

* Shark Tank

* Who Do You Think You Are?

B-Team

* Impractical Jokers

* Jeff Ross Presents: Roast Battles

* Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party

* Undercover Boss

* Property Brothers

* Little Big Shots

I feel like I hear way more people talking about Property Brothers than Fixer Upper. I actually think that if I wanted to watch someone get verbally dressed down, Shark Tank would be better for it than Roast Battles. I've only heard of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives because it's nominated every year, whereas I've only heard of Impractical Jokers because of the four days a year I watch TruTV for the NCAA tournament. Who Do You Think You Are? and Undercover Boss bore me in the same way. I'm going to go ahead and say that the institution, Antiques Roadshow, beats Little Big Shots. That leaves the fun picks. Lip Sync Battles is cute, but we, as a society, have failed if we don't recognize Martha & Snoops's Potluck Dinner Party for the bizarre absurdism that its very existence provides.

Winner: Nominees. 
This pains me, because Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party should never lose to anything, and I've always been bothered by the missing Oxford comma in Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives for years.

Unstructured Reality Program

Nominees:

* Born This Way

* Deadliest Catch

* Gaycation With Ellen Page

* Intervention

# RuPaul's Drag Race: Untucked

* United Shades Of America With W. Kamau Bell

B-Team

* Alaska: The Last Frontier

* Black Market with Michael K. Williams

* Naked and Afraid

* Naked and Afraid XL

* Ride with Normal Reedus

* Wahlburgers

This isn't even fair. The B-Team has Wahlburgers, which is still one of the best show names on TV, not to mention two different Naked and Afraid series. What is the XL for? Bigger episodes? Bigger people? Bigger challengers? All these things sound even better than the original. Oh, and Daryl from The Walking Dead and Omar from The Wire host shows. That said, RuPaul's Drag Race is finally a nominee in two series categories! And, Gaycation with Ellen Page is also one of the best show titles on TV. All of my love of these shows is sarcastic, and I don't care.

Winner: Nominees. 
If I'm being serious, there is far less trash in the Nominees field.

Reality-Competition Program

Nominees

* The Amazing Race • CBS

American Ninja Warrior • NBC

* Project Runway • Lifetime

# RuPaul's Drag Race • VH1

* Top Chef • Bravo

* The Voice • NBC

B-Team

# Survivor

* Team Ninja Warrior

* Dancing with the Stars

* So You Think You Can Dance

* The Wall

* America's Got Talent

I still feel comfortable calling the 87th seasons of The Amazing Race and Survivor a draw. American Ninja Warrior definitely beats Team Ninja Warrior. The nominees in this field don't change much year-to-year, but the only change this year is a big one. RuPaul's Drag Race finally breaks into the field. For years, that has been the big chip in the B-Team's favor. Now that it's a nominee, I'm not sure this is even debatable.

Winner: Nominees. 
I'd love a Drag Race or ANW win.

Host - Reality Program

Nominees

* Martha Stewart & Snoop Dogg (Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party)

* Gordon Ramsay (MasterChef Junior)

* Alec Baldwin (Match Game)

* Heidi Klum & Tim Gunn (Project Runway)

# RuPaul Charles (RuPaul's Drag Race)

* W. Kamau Bell (United Shades Of America With W. Kamau Bell)

B-Team

* Cat Deely (So You Think You Can Dance)

* Padma Lakshmi & Tom Colicchio (Top Chef)

* Chris Hardwick (The Wall)

* Steve Austin (Steve Austin's Broken Skull Challenge)

Akbar Gbajabiamila (American Ninja Warrior)

Matt Iseman (American Ninja Warrior)

I could quibble with the lack of Cat Deeley in the nominee field. That's about all the B-Team has going for it. RuPaul is still nominated. The Heidi Klum/Tim Gunn double-bill is there. I was prepared to have Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg as the sarcastic centerpiece of my B-Team. Instead, even they got nominated.  

Winner: Nominees. 
The most lopsided category yet.

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No surprise here. The Nominees went 4-0. I just don't know enough about the non-nominees to put together an informed B-Team and Drag Race finally being fully embraced by Emmy voters has taken away my major point of dissent.