FYC: Lauren Weedman for Supporting Actress, Comedy

Team Experience shares their personal dream picks in multiple Emmy categories as voting begins. Here's Adam on an actress we're all hoping to see a lot more of... - Editor

Lauren Weedman was to the first season of Looking what Joan Cusack was to Working Girl. They each drifted in and out of the main narrative, never the primary focus, but neither restricted entirely to the background. Their sharply delivered lines punctured their scenes, dick-slapping the audience, demanding attention. While they may have been vital to their best friend’s stories, they couldn’t tell their own stories. 

During the second season, Looking realized the strength of Weedman’s performance, allowing the indispensable Doris to come into her own as a character. Adding another individual to their mosaic of souls wholeheartedly discovering who she was, searching for where she wanted to be, and loving the people that surrounded her elevated the show. We followed Doris as she dealt with the repercussions of losing a parent and revealing her childhood of abuse. We championed Doris when she reclaimed her autonomy by confronting an unhealthy codependent relationship. We swooned when she allowed herself the possibility of a romantic future by finally exposing her vulnerabilities without the masking of her humor.  

Lauren Weedman positively throttled me like a famished crocodile death-rolling a dehydrated antelope during the Doric-centric episode, “Looking for Plot.” That raw, acerbic wit, and melancholic longing Weedman was able to express with only the constricting of her chin muscles split my sides and welled my tear ducts simultaneously. Her fucking CHIN made me feel feels I didn’t even know I was capable of feeling. Jesus.

We will no longer be able to follow this group of friends and lovers around each week but when I reminisce on my times spent with the boys and gal of Looking, I’ll always cherish Lauren Weedman’s performance as Doris. I'll cherish it in much the same way I once, while at a funeral, devoured an entire Edible Arrangement centerpiece while fellow mourners shot me disapproving looks as I selfishly grieved. It may seem reductive to compare Lauren Weedman’s affecting, poignant, barbed performance to that of a gloriously displayed collection of sculpted fruit, but each supported me while I accepted circumstances I couldn’t change, and helped me move on. 

Previously:
The Americans
Jane the Virgin
Cara Seymour, The Knick
Lisa Kudrow, The Comeback
Jon Hamm, Mad Men
Ruth Wilson, The Affair 
Matt Czuchry, The Good Wife 
Gwendolyn Christie, Game of Thrones 

Coming This Week:
Ann Dowd, The Leftovers ...and more!

FYC: Amy Schumer for Best Actress, Comedy

Members of Team Experience were asked to share personal dream picks for this year's impending Emmy nominations. Here's Jose...

Amy Schumer often gets credit for her ingenious writing, larger than life personality and her lack of fear when it comes to addressing controversial topics like the media’s obsession with youth, the importance of the female orgasm and Bill Cosby. However, like most stand up comedians, she rarely is commended for her acting on the assumption that she’s playing herself. And yet, in just a handful of episodes during the third season of "Inside Amy Schumer "she has played everything from clueless spouses, to child beauty queens and even a black & white heroine.

She was recently rewarded with the Critics Choice Award for Best Actress in a Comedy, and if the Emmys dare to break out of their rut of picking perennial faves, they would do much good including her in a lineup with more established actresses:  her timing is as flawless as Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ Selina Meyer, her lack of vanity is akin to Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish, and her idealism (while slightly more infused with cynicism) makes her as strong a role model as Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope. For someone who’s always playing self conscious characters, it’s astonishing to see how self aware and controlled Schumer can be as a performer. And unless she has multiple personality disorder, she's not just playing herself.

FYC: Gwendoline Christie for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama

 Members of Team Experience were asked to share personal dream picks for this year's impending Emmy nominations (with the caveat that they can't have already won the Emmy in that category). Here's Michael C...

 Aren’t you just marvelous! Absolutely singular.”
- Lady Olenna upon meeting Brienne of Tarth

I’m guessing the reactions of a great many audience members mirrored that of Diana Rigg’s Queen of Thorns when they first saw Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth. She cuts such a striking figure, and the match of actress to role is such a flawless one, that it might have taken a few episodes to move beyond fascination with her presence and notice the skill. In a show with numerous longstanding mysteries, Christie has turned the character of Brienne into one of the most consistently compelling. What drives this astonishing woman with her fierce loyalty and her unshakable sense of honor?

This most recent season has offered glimpses into her past, particularly Christie’s moving monologue about the humiliation she received as a youth, but such a wonderfully complex character can’t be reduced to a single anecdote. Brienne is the closest thing to a pure hero that George R.R. Martin’s brutal worldview will allow and Christie manages to keeps her multi-dimensional enough that she is not out of place on such an unsentimental canvas. The actress articulates every wrinkle of Brienne’s prickly personality careful not to skip over her flaws like her stubbornness or the idealism that verges on naïveté. 

Her Brienne of Tarth also stands as a magnificent piece of physical acting. Christie doesn’t just sell her character’s legendary fighting prowess – no small accomplishment – she is able to modulate her fighting style to Brienne’s state of mind. 

In lesser hands Brienne might have come off as more of a concept than a person. A self-conscious attempt to toy with Martin’s favorite theme of outsiders with no place in society. But Christie keeps her so specific that the idea of tokenism never enters into it. She isn’t just the idea of a female warrior there for symbolic value. She is, as The Hound memorably put it, Brienne of fucking Tarth.

Previously on our Emmy series
The Americans, Best Drama | Jane the Virgin, Best Comedy | Lisa Kudrow, Actress | Jon Hamm, Actor | Ruth Wilson, Actress | Matt Czuchry, Supporting Actor and... Cara Seymour on creating "Sister Harriet" on The Knick and that insanely competitive Supporting Actress in a Drama Series Race   

Emmy FYC: Matt Czuchry for Supporting Actor, Drama

Team Experience is sharing their personal Emmy dream picks daily each afternoon. Here's Andrew Kendall...

Even for ardent fans of The Good Wife, I suspect that Czuchry's name is not the first they'd consider when pitching an FYC for the show. Matt Czuchry, like his character Cary Agos on the show, has been oft-ignored. But Czuchry’s inimitable ability to serve up emotion through a glance has always made the character work more than it might in lesser handers. put to good use. This season with former series regular, Josh Charles, off the show, Czuchry stepped up as the next important male with an arc which immediately thrust him into the forefront:

Cary Agos goes to jail... 

But Czuchry does not just earn this FYC for  (finally) having a very strong season arc. The success of his work in season 6 was the way its built on moments since the show's inception. Consider the very first shot of Czuchry on the show. It's so dissonant with the Cary we've come to know, especially this past season. [More after the jump]

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FYC: "Jane the Virgin" For Best Comedy Series

Team Experience shares their preferred picks in top Emmy categories as voters ready their ballots. Here's Denny...

Jane the Virgin shouldn't work. But it does, in every way, in every episode. Based on a Venezuelan telenovela, the show tells the story of Jane (luminous Golden Globe winner Gina Rodriguez), a straight-A college student working at a posh Miami hotel as she completes her degree in Education, who gets accidentally artificially inseminated.

Showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman pulled off a miracle with Jane's first season. There is not a single bad episode. NOT. ONE. And that feat is even more impressive when you consider what a high-wire act each episode of Jane is: Each episode juggles an ever-expanding cast of major characters, multiple flashbacks, in-show telenovelas, fantasy and/or dream sequences, one character (Jane's abuela Alba) who speaks exclusively in subtitled Spanish, and a third-person omniscent narrator who has become a character in his own right.

Oh yeah, and onscreen text, including the only onscreen twitter hashtags that are not only usable but laugh-loud funny. AND real-world issues that surround the show's beautifully-written Latina/o characters

All of this may sound like too much, but somehow it isn't. There's a lightness of touch here missing from most TV comedies - heck, most TV shows PERIOD. The show is able to earn copious amounts of tears while still remaining one of the funniest shows on TV, thanks in equal part to the remarkably assured writing, the tremendous performances (#emmyforrogelio), and the smart direction on display.

While it's true that Emmy hasn't noticed anything on The CW before, honoring Jane the Virgin with a nomination for Best Comedy Series would not only add diversity to the usually lily-white category, it would add credibility. It would show that Emmy voters not only care about quality, but that they don't care where they find it.

P.S. Two brilliant FYC ads if you haven't seen them after the jump...

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