Dream Emmy Ballot 2012: Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie

Benedict Cumberbatch - "Sherlock Holmes", Sherlock
Idris Elba - "John Luther", Luther
Bill Paxton - "Randall McCoy", Hatfields and McCoys
Dominic West - "Fred West", Appropriate Adult
Ben Whishaw - "Freddie Lyon", The Hour

Sherlock's second series focused on examining Holmes' relationships with others, and Cumberbatch's performance utilized the right amount of introspection without seeming out of character or veering off into sentimentality. Much of the same is true of Elba's second-series arc on Luther, particularly in John's relationship with Aimee Ffion-Edwards' wayward teenager. Paxton tapped into a similar vein as his work on Big Love, presenting McCoy as a true believer for whom his family's feud is rooted in a deeply held sense of honor. West's performance was unbelievably chilling, depicting a man who spun an elaborate web of half-truths and outright lies that revealed a conscience-less core. There isn't really another performer right now with the same kind of nervous energy Whishaw brings to bear on his characters, in this case showing Freddie to be someone made restless by a lack of answers, whether in the show's spy plot or in his regular journalistic investigations.

Honorable Mentions: Kevin Costner, Hatfields and McCoys; Woody Harrelson, Game Change; Dylan McDermott, American Horror Story; Bill Nighy, Page Eight; Clive Owen, Hemingway and Gellhorn; Dominic West, The Hour

I Wouldn't Be Surprised to See: Sean Bean, Missing; Douglas Booth, Great Expectations; Bruce Greenwood, The River; Rob Lowe, Drew Peterson: Untouchable; Eddie Redmayne, Birdsong; Alan Rickman, The Song of Lunch

Dream Emmy Ballot 2012: The Unsubmitted

It's well past time to get this show on the road. Ideally, I like to get these done and posted before the nominations get announced. We'll see how far we get before tomorrow morning.

Andrew Scott - "Jim Moriarty", Sherlock

Here's where I wish for a site that focused on the mechanics of how the television academy votes, because I'm not sure whether PBS electing to submit "A Scandal in Belgravia" for Sherlock precluded Scott from submitting his work in "The Reichenbach Fall". (It's a curious decision overall, as I think "Reichenbach Fall" is a stronger episode all around, especially for the central actors.) If that isn't the case, it's not surprising, necessarily, that Scott didn't submit, given that Cumberbatch and Freeman didn't get nominated last year, but his performance was such a standout that it's disappointing regardless. (He just won a BAFTA, for goodness' sake.) The scene where Moriarty insists he's actually an actor was eerie perfection in sowing little seeds of doubt.

Indeed, there's a whole chunk of British actors who I was surprised to see unlisted in the ballot of prospective nominees. Underinformed management teams across the pond?

Jack Gleeson - "Joffrey Baratheon", Game of Thrones
Charles Dance - "Tywin Lannister", Game of Thrones

More than the others, I think these two being absent from the ballot represents someone asleep at the wheel in compiling HBO's submission package. Gleeson and Dance helped the show's writers demonstrate a sense of scope in depicting the Lannisters and their thirst for power - Tywin as the craftiest guy in the room, but also a man who recognizes the potential inherent in being the one pulling the strings instead of the public face, and Joffrey as the rotten manifestation of all his family's foibles.

Laura Carmichael - "Lady Edith Crawley", Downton Abbey
Zoe Boyle - "Lavinia Swire", Downton Abbey

The Downton Abbey-as-convalescent-home storyline gave Carmichael an opportunity to grant some much-needed shading to Edith as she discovered a sense of purpose in helping others. (And Carmichael pretty much single-handedly kept that whole potential-heir/burn-victim story from going too far off the rails.) I think the fundamentally good-hearted but ultimately doomed young woman (Beth March, Melanie Wilkes, etc., etc.) is a deceptively difficult role, but Boyle performed hers capably.

Anna Chancellor - "Lix Storm", The Hour

An old-school character for a period show, Chancellor's savvy, experienced newswoman provided good low-key balance to the energies brought by Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai. (And her character feels more and more valuable the more I watch of The Newsroom. Another rant for another time.)

Alex Karpovsky - "Ray", Girls
Andrew Rannells - "Elijah", Girls

Both Karpovsky and Rannells performed admirably in their roles as the blunt truth-tellers of the Girls universe, keeping the show on an even keel by tempering the self-absorption of other characters. They also had my absolute favorite moments in the finale - Karpovsky's scenes with Zosia Mamet (there is like not even enough material there to get shipper-y over, and yet I am slightly obsessed with the concept of Ray and Shoshanna together. I need it to happen in Season Two) and Rannells' line reading of "Girls who huff." (The tone of which is difficult to communicate here, but it cracks me up every time.)

Matt Ross - "Dr. Charles Montgomery", American Horror Story

I already think Ross was criminally underrecognized for his work on Big Love, so that's probably giving him a boost here. But he made Dr. Montgomery's Frankenstein-esque forays into medical experimentation some of AHS's best trips over the top.

Lamorne Morris - "Winston", New Girl
Dan Byrd - "Travis Cobb", Cougar Town

I tend to take a sort of "Throw your hat in the ring! Why not?" attitude towards most potential submissions, especially when most or all of the other members of an ensemble present as contenders. It took New Girl's writers longer to "find" Winston than it did for Nick and Schmidt, but by the end of the season, Morris had turned in some good moments too. (Like the Theodore K. Mullins speech). And some of Byrd's best work on Cougar Town came this year in their exploration of Travis and Laurie's relationship.

Taran Killam - "Mr. Rad", Community

Maybe Community's best one-off, grounding the show's Glee parody in crazy-eyed mania and subtly sending up Matthew Morrison's performance as Will Schuster.

Roger Bart - "Mason Treadwell", Revenge
Ashton Holmes - "Tyler Barrol", Revenge

Bart was the best of the characters against whom Emily sought revenge, showing the cracks in his man-about-town facade where his image of himself as a journalist comes into conflict with the knowledge of how he sold his soul and screwed the Clarkes over. And Holmes' performance fit perfectly into the vein of classic crazy soap villains, from quiet menace to devourer of scenery.

Jay Jackson - "Perd Hapley", Parks and Recreation

Jackson has become Parks and Rec's most valuable tertiary player over four seasons, representing the heart of Pawnee's absurd media culture. The fourth season's depiction of the election cycle gave him ample opportunities for more examples of Perd's affable cluelessness - my favorite might be his running out the clock on Leslie's response in "The Debate."

Morena Baccarin - "Isobel Swift", The Good Wife
Mary Beth Peil - "Jackie Florrick", The Good Wife
Parker Posey - "Vanessa Gold", The Good Wife

Baccarin held her own as a foil to Dylan Baker's Colin Sweeney, a character who is essentially designed to suck all the air out of the room. Peil was great both in shrouding Jackie's machinations in a faux-innocent "who, me?" exterior, and in muddling her motivations as potential mental issues came into play in the latter episodes of the season. And maybe it's residual Josie and the Pussycats love, but I thought Posey and Alan Cumming were delightful together as politically minded exes.

Kate Burton - "Vice President Sally Langston", Scandal

Burton had twice as many potential submissions as ultimately ended up on the ballot, so I'm not surprised that her Scandal role fell by the wayside. Nevertheless, her scenes as the evangelical Christian VP of Scandal's universe didn't veer over into caricature when they easily could have and suggested that the show going forward may have some very interesting things to say about women in politics. (And as a lover of troupe-building creators, I love that Shonda Rhimes gave her such a different character from Ellis Grey to play here.)

Alison Brie - "Trudy Campbell", Mad Men
Embeth Davidtz - "Rebecca Pryce", Mad Men
Christine Estabrook - "Gail Holloway", Mad Men
Sam Page - "Greg Harris", Mad Men

None are terribly flashy performances, but all contribute to the fully realized world of Mad Men, particularly in the interplay and contrast between home and office beyond whatever Don's situation is in any given year. I've always been disappointed not to see Page submit his name for consideration - true, most (if not all) Mad Men fans hate Greg, but Page has always done a great job of presenting him without judgment, with all his weaknesses. You want Greg to accept responsibility for why things in his life are the way they are, but also understand why he doesn't feel the need to be introspective. I don't think Page gets enough credit for that.

Books Read: August 2011

August 3: A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

Somewhere in the middle of this book, I began to feel like I needed to start back at the beginning of A Game of Thrones and make myself a comprehensive flow chart of characters, locations and situations as I read. While I understand the complaints of the fans who waited for years for this book to come out, I have to say that starting the series just this year means that I haven't had the time to re-read and obsess, making the ever-expanding cast of characters much harder to grasp in anything even approaching a comprehensive fashion. There ends up being a lot of "Oh, this is like that guy with the thing..." For most of the points of view, this doesn't make too terribly much of a difference in appreciating Martin's depiction of a world being subsumed by darkness (and wondering how on earth they'll translate some of the stories to the screen if Game of Thrones gets this far). It's certainly a lot of information to process, though. A few years until The Winds of Winter doesn't sound bad at all to me.

August 28: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

I ended up re-watching Sherlock as I moved things around my apartment in preparation for the hurricane, then decided to download this on to my Kindle for some weekend reading. Which then came in handy after my power went out. I don't really think I understood how much of the adaptation for the show is really about capturing an ethos rather than telling the exact same story until I read A Study in Scarlet. It's sort of intangible and difficult to describe, but there's just something tonal that the writers behind the show seem to get about Holmes, Watson and the structures of the mysteries that were missing in the recent Guy Ritchie film. Not gravity, necessarily...I'm not sure exactly what word I'm looking for.

I also read "A Scandal in Bohemia" - it seemed like an appropriate companion piece to the weekend to read the story of perhaps literature's most well-known Irene - and I'm really curious to see how it translates in the show's second series. The basic setup of the story - a prominent man tries to retrieve a potentially reputation-damaging photograph - seems very well-suited to Sherlock's style of updating. And after seeing the way he's framed characters like River Song and Madame de Pompadour in "The Girl in the Fireplace" in Doctor Who, I'm really intrigued to see how Steven Moffat writes a 21st-century Irene Adler as a foil for Holmes.