Emmys: Voting In Progress As Shows Make Final Pitches In Biggest Campaign Season Yet – Deadline

Last night, the Television Academy sent out a notice to all eligible voters that Phase One balloting for Emmy nominations has begun, with a return deadline of June 26. A lot of people are going to be disappointed on July 13th, one awards pundit predicted to me recently about the morning nominations will be announced.

We were discussing the sheer volume of contenders with big campaigns behind them this year. It seems a lotof people have high hopes. Every year it gets bigger and the odds get longer but this one seems unprecedented in Emmy history. Everywhereyou go there is some For Your Consideration ad for some show staring you in the face. Just yesterday, as I was driving down La Cienega Boulevard, the sheer numbers of banners hanging from every light pole was staggering. On one side were ads for FYC events at Upright Citizens Brigade that NBCUniversal had for the likes ofSuperstore, Master Of None and The Good Placeamong others. On the left side of the street CBS Studios was advertising FYC events taking place in Studio City from 8-10 AM for programs includingLate Late Show With James Corden(8AM? Are they kidding?).

Hulu

But they arent alone with the morning stuff. Netflix offered a waffle breakfast to lure potential voters to their below-the-line soirees forStranger Things crafts artisans Sunday at their rented 29,000-square-foot office space in Beverly Hills where they have been holding daily FYC events for the past few weeks, known as Netflix FYSee. Several women dressed as Handmaids were seen marching around at various L.A. hot spots over the weekend to promote HulusThe Handmaids Tale(unless they were just crazy fans), while FX was busy trying to drum up new Russian paranoia as if we dont have enough in well-placed ads in the New York Times and elsewhere for The Americans, aboutundercover Russian spies in the U.S.

FX

The list goes on and on, and if you are a voting Academy member as I have been for decades, you are inundated constantly with all this stuff. This year has been worse that ever in terms of screeners, which I have piled up everywhere at this point and they keep coming not only by mail and streaming subscriptions but also stuffed in the pages of Emmy Magazine which always balloons in size this time of year.

In the goodie bag at this weekends PGA Produced By event on the Fox lot was a large drug prescription bottle for Vice that was filled with little white candy (I hope) pills. After I got back from my May sojourn to the Cannes Film Festival, I was greeted with a rotting box of Rainbow Bagels and Funfetti Cream Cheese (yuk!) courtesy of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidtthat had obviously been sitting there a few days awaiting my return.

And on top of all this have been endless, and I meanendless, FYC events every night, and sometimes two or three a night coming from unofficial events at the TV Academys Wolf Theatre at its Saban Media Center, duplicate events for members in NYC, the aforementioned UCB, as well as nightly FYC sessions (with an open bar) at the Netflix temporary Emmy headquarters, and earlier in the season for Amazons shows at their makeshift but impressive shrine to themselves at the Hollywood Athletic Club. And they are allpacked.

I moderated a fun and lively session at Netflix on Friday for its innovativeA Series Of Unfortunate Events,with cast including Neil Patrick Harris and executive producer Barry Sonnenfeld, that was SRO even considering NBC was throwing a FYC event forHairspraywith a live concert componentacross town at the TV Academy at the exact same time. Of course, there are now 24,000 Academy members and about 21,500 of them can vote, so that makes for a lot of potential customers for these things. By my count I received 25 slickly produced invites in the mail, times double or triple that on email invites. Atallof these things liquor and food is readily available and schmoozing encouraged. Attendees can often be seen handing out business cards to anyone who looks like they can give them a job.

CBS Studios

In order to compete and get noticed with all of this stuff aimed at voters, some places are getting innovative particularly CBS, which doesnt really seem to want to spend the kind of loot cable competitors, and especially those upstart streamers, are forking over. CBS sitcomMomtook out ads announcing that in lieu of a $250,000 Emmy campaign this year, they will donate the money to Planned Parenthood. And CBS Studios yesterday started handing out FYC reusable tote bags at farmers markets around town.

They also are going green with their Emmy mailer. With the tagline This Emmy race makes the world a better place, our mailer is a contrast to some of the huge heavy screeners piling on desks and stuffing mailboxes this season, a spokesperson tells me. Our mailer is wrapped in a seed-embedded, plantable belly-band and made of 100% recycled material. Who knew you could plantscreeners of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend?An attached card directs voters to their site to stream episodes of their shows.

Nearly everyone offers cards with free access to their shows, including full seasons. The TV Academy itself runs a portal, for a price of course, to studios, where members can see programming year-round.

Netflix

Whereas the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences continually refines its rules of campaigning to curtail or frown upon this kind of volume activity during their high holy season, the Television Academy (where I served on the Board of Governors for six years) has always turned a mostly blind eye to it, although it does have standards and wont allow certain over-the-top practices at their house of TV worship in North Hollywood (all invites for those are coordinated and sent through the Academy, even if at the bottom of each invite there is a disclaimer saying it is not an Academy event).

I am not sure if any of this actually results in hard-core votes (well FYSee), but it actually has turned into a kind of fun time of year in which the TV industry is basically proving they have alotof interest in Emmy season, and the TV Academy, while making money off theater rentals, mailings and Emmy Magazine ads, is also increasing its importance with all this attention paid. (Full disclosure: Deadline also kicks things off in early April each year with a well-attended The Contenders Emmys all-day event at the DGA theater, with videos of the some 50 participating shows published twice daily on Deadline right up to the start of voting.)

Now it is crunch time to see whether all this effort being poured into just Phase One of Emmy season really pays off. For some it will, and that is probably justification enough for all the hoopla that makes the Emmy period a real rival to Oscar season.

Read more here:

Emmys: Voting In Progress As Shows Make Final Pitches In Biggest Campaign Season Yet - Deadline