For my latest little study, I've decided to combine two of my favorite things: TV and numbers. I know, I know, this must be hard to believe. ME taking something subjective, like, say, the Emmys and trying to pull meaningful numbers from them. But, never you fear, I found something that I could waste countless hours on, sorting out data in the least efficient way possible, so that I could answer the most meaningless of all questions.
What is this study, you ask. As you probably gather from the name of this post, it's all about breaking down the nominees. The two ways I determined this could be done are looking at two things: Consistency and age, considering those are two things I could pretty easily calculate.
This all began with me asking myself what the discrepancy between men and women were in TV shows. My hypothesis going in was that the Actress categories were going to be substantially younger than the Actor categories. My thinking was that show business is quicker to throw away women than men once they stop being, simply, nice to look at.
I will say, the results were not what I expected. I decided to go back 20 years, looking at the comedy and drama nominees from 1993 to the present to see what I found.
Average age of a nominee from 1993-2012Lead Actress Comedy 40.61
Lead Actress Drama 43.13
Lead Actor Comedy 44.45
Sup Actor Comedy 45
Sup Actress Drama 45.09
Sup Actress Comedy 45.29
Lead Actor Drama 46.335
Sup Actor Drama 50.10
Guest Actress Drama 53.96
Guest Actor Comedy 54.47
Guest Actress Comedy 56.79
Guest Actor Drama 57.15
I've got to say, these results largely surprised me, but let's go over what didn't surprise me. The oldest fields by a lot were the guest acting categories. For years, I've joked (mostly to myself because it was apparently an inside joke in my own head) that the Guest Actress in a Drama category was the SVU Retired Actress Award. The winner several years running was some former Emmy or Oscar winner looking for one more statue to put on her mantle. As it turns out, that was the youngest of the guest acting categories. Still, it made sense that the average age would be that. The nominees every year are some familiar names that they dust off for a day's work and Emmy voters remember fondly enough to nominate.
In fact, it makes a lot of sense looking at the nominee breakdown. The grind of working on a TV show can be exactly that, a grind. In terms of total hours of work needed, except for Lead Actor in a Drama, the age breakdown works out from oldest to youngest going from Guest to Supporting to Lead. Lead roles go to the younger people it seems.
I was expecting it to move from Supporting roles to aging into becoming Leads and fading away into Guest roles. By nominations, this doesn't follow, but keep in mind most show have a larger supporting cast than lead roles. The Emmys seem to recognize solid role players who help prop up the leads over the younger, supporting characters that threaten to take over the show.
Also, the fact that the youngest average category is still over 40 means that most TV actors have to go through years of proving themselves before getting award recognition. Sure, a few outliers throw the numbers off some, but not as much as you'd think.
The other thing I wanted to challenge was the notion that once you've been nominated, the Emmys remember you, or alternately, multiple nominations are the rule, not the exception. This, largely, turned out to be true. Here's some charts I found interesting.
Actors and Actresses with multiple of any Emmy nomination (1993-2012)Actors 76.9%
Actresses 79.3%Actors and Actresses with multiple Comedy nominations (1993-2012)Actors 73.6%
Actresses 82.0%Actors and Actresses with multiple Drama nominations (1993-2012)
Actors 70.4%
Actresses 74.4%Actors and Actresses with multiple nomination in the same category (1993-2012)
Lead Actor Drama 83.8%
Lead Actress Drama 90.5%
Supporting Actor Drama 72.6%
Supporting Actress Drama 72.4%
Guest Actor Drama 43.0%
Guest Actress Drama 45.8%
Lead Actor Comedy 84.0%
Lead Actress Comedy 88.6%
Supporting Actor Comedy 89.5%
Supporting Actress Comedy 85.8%
Guest Actor Comedy 38.8%
Guest Actress Comedy 52.8%
I did a lot more calculations for 3, 4,5 or more nominations but they were largely without anomalies and well represented by the 2+ nominees numbers. As expected, the importance of a character to a show is majorly reflected here. Guest Actors are just that, guests, so repeat nominees are rare. Lead roles normally define a series, so they are not likely to change, thus they are the most consistent fields.
Some observations to be made from the following figures:
-Overall, men vs. women (76.9 vs. 79.3) are pretty even in terms of nominee consistency.
-Despite the growing number of strong female voices over the past few years, in comedy, there is still a rather large discrepancy in recognizing them in comedy. 73.6% men vs. 82.0% women means that fewer new voices are recognized and the Emmy voters just pick the names they are familiar with.
-It looks like the dramatic supporting roles lean less toward consistency than the comedy roles. This actually makes sense when you consider the number of single season arc characters that have been promoted to supporting roles over the past couple years, like last year's Supporting Actress (Drama) winner, Margo Martindale, or this year's Supporting Actor in a Drama nominee, Giancarlo Esposito. Comedy tends to pull from taking the familiar characters and mining that for laughs and Drama benefits from being fresh, new, and compelling.
Wow, this has gone on a little longer than I intended. Why did no one stop me? Oh yeah. Blog. That's right. Well, I hope any of this was interesting and not just an incomprehensible mess of numbers and observations. I guess the conclusion of this is that the numbers followed as I expected. The Emmys like to nominate the same people and this consistency results in fairly old ages to the nominees, although the older the actor, the less general importance to a series he/she has.
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