Lifestyle
Tired of waiting for the delayed Emmys? Our TV critic presents The Deggy Awards
So what if the second season of The Bear isn’t eligible for Monday’s Emmys? The annual, imaginary Deggy Awards aren’t concerned with arbitrary cutoffs or categories. Above, Jeremy Allen White and Molly Gordon in The Bear, Season 2.
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So what if the second season of The Bear isn’t eligible for Monday’s Emmys? The annual, imaginary Deggy Awards aren’t concerned with arbitrary cutoffs or categories. Above, Jeremy Allen White and Molly Gordon in The Bear, Season 2.
Chuck Hodes/FX
There may not be a more confusing time for the 75th Emmy awards to take the stage.
That’s because 2023’s Emmys ceremony, delayed by the Hollywood writers and performers strikes to Monday, Jan. 15, will probably wind up honoring a different set of TV episodes than the programs honored a day earlier by the Critics’ Choice Awards or this past Sunday by the Golden Globes.
Let’s look at FX’s The Bear – a searing drama with touches of humor, already confusingly classified as a comedy. It’s nominated at the Emmys for its first season, which aired before the May 31, 2023, cutoff for the current nominees. But at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, The Bear is judged on episodes from its second season, which dropped on Hulu June 22, because those shows can honor anything that aired in 2023.
Jamie Lee Curtis as Carmy’s mother, Donna, in Season 2 of The Bear.
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Jamie Lee Curtis as Carmy’s mother, Donna, in Season 2 of The Bear.
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(So please, don’t send me any emails or social media posts complaining that Jamie Lee Curtis got robbed at the Emmys. Her excellent turn in The Bear‘s second season as Carmy Berzatto’s unhinged mom won’t be eligible until this fall, when she will likely scoop up all the flowers she deserves at the 76th Emmy awards.)
All this serves as a poignant argument for why the Emmys academy (officially known as the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) might need a little help picking out the best TV performances in a turbulent year. Yes, TV fanatics, it’s time for my own, annual – strike-delayed – edition of The Deggys.
Improving the Emmys with The Deggys
Through tireless TV watching and a know-it-all critic’s stubborn insistence that my opinion can kickstart a fun pop culture conversation, I’ve managed to turn The Deggys into something of an NPR tradition. The rules are pretty simple – there aren’t many. That’s because too often those knuckleheaded requirements – like cutoff dates for when series are eligible – can keep the most deserving efforts from the winners circle. Not on my watch, pal.
Here’s is where I get to dish on what should and will win, with few-holds-barred and a skeptical eye out for groupthink and prevailing trends.
As a bonus, this can be your handy guide to what’s worth watching on TV from 2023 that you might have missed. So let’s get into it!
Best Drama Series
Nominees: Andor (Disney+), Better Call Saul (AMC), The Crown (Netflix), House of the Dragon (HBO), The Last of Us (HBO), Succession (HBO), The White Lotus (HBO), Yellowjackets (Showtime).
And the Deggy goes to … Succession.
Matthew MacFadyen and Sarah Snook in HBO’s Succession.
HBO
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Matthew MacFadyen and Sarah Snook in HBO’s Succession.
HBO
One of the toughest things to do in television is to provide a finale that is surprising, thrilling, appropriate and completely true-to-form for a high-quality series that, frankly, every fan on the planet has already gamed out with their own proposed endings. But somehow, creator/showrunner Jesse Armstrong and the crew at Succession pulled it off, denying Jeremy Strong’s man-child Kendall control of the family-run, Murdoch-ish media behemoth, while staying true to the series’ incisive look at a corrosive family and America’s dysfunctional political/business systems.
I also wonder if Emmy voters will even remember some of these competing series enough to consider them seriously as contenders. Disney+’s Star Wars spinoff Andor debuted in September 2022; Better Call Saul concluded its stellar run with a mesmerizing finale in August 2022. Good as some of these other contenders were, none of them achieved what Succession did in a final season where sticking the landing justified the obsessive focus so many of us had on this show from its very first season.
OK, but who will actually win? That’s also Succession. For years now, I’ve been giving away my big secret for predicting awards show winners, which involves looking at the list of most-nominated programs overall. That tells you what the voting body thinks of each series, and Succession has the most nominations of any series this time around at 27 – including nominations for just about every major performer on the program. So it seems like the Emmy academy is tracking with my own taste on this one, despite strong competition from The Last of Us (24 nominations) and The White Lotus (23 nominations).
Best Comedy Series
Nominees: Abbott Elementary (ABC), Barry (HBO), The Bear (FX/Hulu), Jury Duty (Peacock), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Prime Video), Only Murders in the Building (Hulu), Ted Lasso (Apple TV+), Wednesday (Netflix).
And the Deggy goes to … The Bear
Jeremy Allen White as Carmy Berzatto in The Bear.
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Jeremy Allen White as Carmy Berzatto in The Bear.
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This, of course, is the reason why FX decided to place the show in this category, where its gritty emotionalism would stand out, away from the cage match of Succession vs. White Lotus vs. The Last of Us. Normally, I wouldn’t reward such shenanigans, but The Bear is a show which has flowered mightily over two seasons, finding its voice while speaking on issues of class, race, capitalism, and found family vs the biological kind, and the scars each can leave. That edges it past Ted Lasso‘s less-assured third season (Apple TV+ still won’t even say if that was the show’s finale run) and inspired-yet-not-quite transcendent turns from Only Murders in the Building and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Runner-up: Barry, which turned TV upside down with so much of its production and content. But the finale was even grimmer than The Bear, and left me less excited about the show overall.
OK, but who will actually win? Ted Lasso. Looking at the total nominations, Ted Lasso has nearly twice the number as The Bear (21 versus 13). And in this oddball, delayed Emmycast, Ted Lasso‘s finale season, which wrapped up May 31, is competing against The Bear‘s first season, which was a little less impressive than its world-building, cameo-filled second go-round. Fortunately, the Deggys can cut through all that deadline stuff to focus on the episodes which aired in 2023.
Best Limited or Anthology Series
Nominees: Beef (Netflix), Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer series (Netflix), Daisy Jones & the Six (Prime Video), Fleishman Is in Trouble (FX), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Disney+)
And the Deggy goes to … Beef.
Steven Yeun as Danny in Beef.
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Steven Yeun as Danny in Beef.
Andrew Cooper/Netflix
For me, it’s not even close. This gonzo look at how an incident of road rage in a parking lot spirals into a blood feud that exposed the hollow hypocrisy of two lives – in the process taking on everything from Asian American family culture to runaway capitalism and forgiveness – is one of the most unexpected pleasures of last year’s TV season. Add in Steven Yeun and Ali Wong acting their behinds off – yes, they’re getting Deggys for best actor and actress in a limited series, to go with their Golden Globe wins – and you have an undeniable triumph. Which is why…
OK, who will actually win? Beef, once again. Mostly because it doesn’t have the moral complications of elevating a serial killer like the Dahmer series, or the uneven story of Daisy Jones and Fleishman or the inexplicable nomination of a moribund Star Wars series in Obi-Wan Kenobi. Even the Emmy academy can’t mess up this category that badly. I hope.
Best Supporting Actress in a Drama
Nominees: Aubrey Plaza, The White Lotus; Elizabeth Debicki, The Crown; J. Smith-Cameron, Succession; Jennifer Coolidge, The White Lotus; Meghann Fahy, The White Lotus; Rhea Seehorn, Better Call Saul; Sabrina Impacciatore, The White Lotus; Simona Tabasco, The White Lotus.
And the Deggy goes to … Elizabeth Debicki, J. Smith-Cameron AND Rhea Seehorn.
Elizabeth Debicki in The Crown
Netflix
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Elizabeth Debicki in The Crown
Netflix
Didn’t I say there were few rules here? This follows in a couple of Deggy traditions, handing an award to Seehorn — an actor criminally overlooked by the Emmys during her time on Better Call Saul – and giving multiple honors to deserving nominees in the same category (still waiting on my “thank you” from Steve Martin and Martin Short for 2022, by the way).
Rhea Seehorn in Better Call Saul.
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Rhea Seehorn in Better Call Saul.
Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures TV
But these performers all turned in mind-boggling performances this cycle, from Smith-Cameron’s exasperated, always-surviving underling Gerri to Debicki’s spellbinding ability to embody Princess Diana without ever looking like she was delivering an impression or mimicry. And Seehorn already has a Deggy for her bravura performance as Kim Wexler, a woman who decided to save her soul by leaving behind a man she loved. Fortunately, for the Deggys, I don’t have to pick between them.
OK, who will actually win? Jennifer Coolidge. The Emmy academy loves her take on The White Lotus‘ needy, self-absorbed heiress Tanya McQuoid. And since she – spoiler alert – dies in the most recent episodes, this is the last chance to get a show-stopping Coolidge acceptance speech in the telecast.
Best Talk Series
Nominees: The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (Comedy Central), Jimmy Kimmel Live! (ABC), Late Night with Seth Meyers (NBC), The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS), The Problem with Jon Stewart (Apple TV+).
And the Deggy goes to … Late Night with Seth Meyers and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Seth Meyers on Dec. 13, 2023.
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Seth Meyers on Dec. 13, 2023.
Lloyd Bishop/NBC
This time around, the Emmy academy rejiggered its rules so Oliver, who wins this category most every year, would be shunted off to compete against Saturday Night Live, which always wins its category, Scripted Variety Series. But Meyers’ and Oliver’s shows belong in the same category, so I’m undoing that nonsense. Oliver deliberately tackles some of the toughest topics on television and makes them entertaining, insightful and impactful (please check out this one on freight trains, this one on dollar stores and this story on how they hijacked New Zealand’s Bird of the Century contest). Meyers seems to relax into his own skin more every season, offering incisive political takes with an ease and charm that impresses.
Honorable mention/shoutout: The Daily Show, which has reinvented itself every week to accommodate guest hosts since Trevor Noah left the program in late 2022. And props to every show nominated, which saw new episodes halted for months by the Hollywood writers strike, just as questions about the survival of the genre have grown.
OK, so who will actually win? Colbert in his category and Oliver in his. Because Emmy loves those guys in ways they have certainly earned.
Sunday Puzzle
NPR
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NPR
On-air challenge
I’m going to give you two five-letter words. Add the same two letters at the end of the first one and the start of the second one, in each case to complete a familiar seven-letter word.
Ex. Later Ready –> LATERAL/ALREADY
1. Habit Tempt
2. Laten Press
3. Blank Ching
4. Since Venue
5. Shack Groom
6. Surge Stage
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
Answer: Los Angeles –> Laos, Senegal
Winner
Elaine Neel of Derby, Kansas.
This week’s challenge
Next weekend will be the 186th convention of the National Puzzler League, in Bloomington, Ind., which I’ll be attending as always. Two other people who will be there are Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who created this week’s challenge. Name two words that are opposites. They share a single letter. Remove that shared letter from each word, put a hyphen between the two starting words, and you’ll get a term you sometimes see in food ads. What are the two words?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 9 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
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Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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