2022 Emmy Nominations: Everything You Need to Know

The 74th Emmy Awards air on Sept 12 at 8 p.m. eastern on NBC, and we here at CableTV.com like to be prepared. Who’s nominated? Who are the front-runners? Who got snubbed?

Hosts JB Smoove and Melissa Fumero revealed the 2022 nominees on Tuesday, July 12, and we’ve taken the liberty of analyzing some of the biggest categories for you. For a full list of nominees, check out the Emmys website.

Comedy

Two-thirds of Only Murders in the Building’s main trio got acting nominations, leaving Selena Gomez out in the cold. Sorry, Wizards of Waverly Place fans.

As for the categories not listed here, Ted Lasso did pretty well for itself with eight more of its actors nominated in supporting and guest categories: Brett Goldstein, Toheeb Jimoh, Nick Mohammed, Juno Temple, Hannah Waddingham, James Lance (Trent Crimm, The Independent), Sam Richardson, and Harriet Walter.

We don’t want to spoil anything about a certain Marvel movie currently in theaters, but Marvel fans might want to keep an eye on one of those names.

There’s one more thing we can say for sure, and it’s that the Emmys judges have good taste in SNL cast members. Bowen Yang and Kate McKinnon were both nominated. McKinnon is leaving the show, so now’s a great time to film your TikTok auditions for Lorne.

Drama

Between Stranger Things and the comedy nominations for What We Do in the Shadows, it’s a good year to be a fan of spooky stuff. We’re surprised to see Sadie Sink and Gaten Matarazzo missing from the list, though, after their performances in Stranger Things—the judges must not have seen Part 2 before they made their choices.

As for the nominees, it’s clear the Emmys are big fans of Succession. Nicholas Braun, Kieran Culkin, Matthew Macfadyen, J. Smith-Cameron, Sarah Snook, Adrien Brody, James Cromwell, Arian Moayed, Alexander Skarsgård, Hope Davis, Sanaa Lathan, and Harriet Walter all bagged individual nominations as supporting and guest actors as well.

It’s a bad year to be Alan Ruck, the only member of the fictional Roy family not to be nominated. It’s a good year to be Harriet Walter, who might end up winning the same award for both comedy and drama in the same year.

Also, is it just us, or is it surprising that Squid Game came out last September? It feels like that happened way earlier in the pandemic.

Limited or Anthology Series, Movie

TV shows feel like they’re getting shorter every year, so it’s not super clear where the line is between a drama and a limited series. But it kind of seems like “limited series” means any show involving a scammer, a scandal, or a grift.

The line between television movie and regular streamer also seems blurry, but Chip ‘n Dale was not a nomination we were expecting. Is that the best we could do, Emmys? The movie where The Little Mermaid’s Flounder gets trafficked and forced into hardcore surgery against his will? The movie with an entire character named “Ugly Sonic?”

Animation

In a move that continues to pit comedies like The Simpsons against fantasy steampunk dramas like Arcane, the Emmys follow the awards show tradition of treating animation like a genre and not a medium. Animated shows also differ from live-action in that the judges only pick a single episode to nominate.

That means that the entirety of What If…? isn’t nominated, just the episode “What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead Of His Hands?” It certainly deserves it for the animation work on all of the eldritch creatures Strange tries to tame, but we’re glad the best episode, “What If… T’Challa Became a Star-Lord?” also got recognition through Chadwick Boseman’s posthumous voice-over nomination.

It’s also weird that there’s no category for a voice actor in an animated show—Boseman is nominated with narrators from live-action shows like Bridgerton’s Julie Andrews and Moon Knight’s F. Murray Abraham.

If you’re looking for fan favorites like The Owl House or Dead End: Paranormal Park, those are technically kids shows, so they’ll get their own Emmys ceremony later in the year. The regular Emmys in September focus only on adult animation, a market that gets bigger every year. How are they still nominating The Simpsons?

We’re glad to see Arcane on this list, and it’s definitely going to win, but we can name a ton of adult animated shows that probably should have been recognized here as well. (Come on, nothing for Prime Video’s Vox Machina?)