Emmy Review: Supporting Actor in a Drama

By Abe Friedtanzer

There were a staggering 455 men on this particular ballot, the most in any category this year (and ever). It’s a wonder that five shows are still represented by eight nominees. The question is whether actors whose costars are nominated – like the boys from Succession or Critics Choice winner Billy Crudup – can distinguish themselves like Peter Dinklage managed to do last year with his fourth trophy for Game of Thrones. Or will having no internal competition propel someone else to the win?

I’ll try to avoid major plot details in my analysis – but if you’d like more spoiler-filled descriptions, click on the episode titles. Let’s consider each nominee…

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Stage Door: This is Our Youth

Here's Matthew Eng on a theatrical revival in NYC of interest to movie fans...

There’s always a bit of wariness involved when approaching our favorite artists’ earliest works, a back-of-the-brain hesitancy that carefully warns us to temper our expectations for these formative, often preliminary pieces. You know what I mean: those scrappily ambitious but almost inevitably uneven calling cards, the ones that were created pre-renown, even pre-agent. They were toiled over on the side, while dwelling in dubious “studio” apartments during stationary years spent wage-slaving in temp jobs, originally imagined while dawdling on a dorm mattress or in a childhood bedroom, when success was a foreign and totally faraway desire.

Success has surely been a much more familiar if nonetheless scattered concept for Kenneth Lonergan in the years since This is Our Youth broke out Off-Broadway in 1996, launching his own career on stage and screen, as well as those of original cast members Josh Hamilton, Missy Yager, and, most notably, that trusted Lonergan staple, Mark Ruffalo. I’m not overly acquainted with Lonergan’s playwriting aside from Youth, but as an ardent fan of You Can Count on Me and Margaret, it’s easy to see the same writerly penchant for considerate, character-driven narratives that would give us both Sammy and Terry Prescott, and (after much delay) Lisa Cohen and her entire, erratic orbit of friends, family members, and tragic, tenacious, and tough-talking passersby.

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