All the Big Emmys Winners Have This One Thing in Common

Robert Gauthier//Getty Images6 min readThe Emmys sent a single, clear message last night, and it was a call for help: We need more good guys.The Emmys, just like the Oscars, don’t necessarily celebrate what will be timeless. They are a guide to what matters right now, in this time and place. The recurring theme during Monday’s TV honors was to honor unlikely heroes who step up when the going gets weird.It’s a hairpin turn from last year, when the awards were a spotlight on monsters, psychopaths, and egomaniacs. Severance, Adolescence, and The Studio were the recurring winners last time, each a repository for despair, darkness, mania. That was what voters and viewers wanted to get off their chests and out of their system. The rare counterexample was Noah Wyle’s win for best actor in a drama for The Pitt’s valiant Dr. Robby.He was the exception then; this year he was the rule. Wyle won again for The Pitt on Monday, and the show itself claimed best drama. The night’s other acting winners shared similar noble traits with his dauntless emergency room M.D. If toxic personalities were what the Emmys exhaled last year, this time they tried to breathe in goodness, strength, and decency.NBC//Getty ImagesMacaulay Culkin, Dan Levy, and Annie Murphy’s tribute to the late Catherine O’Hara as one of the night’s most beautiful moments.Rhea Seehorn is Exhibit A. She claimed lead actress in a drama for the abrasive but uncompromising Carol Sturka of Pluribus, one of a handful of human beings who sees the whole planet become a hive mind, but stubbornly fights for a way to maintain her independence and sanity.Pluribus also picked up the best drama writing award, and creator Vince Gilligan captured the night’s unexpected theme in his speech, noting that working and living in harmony does not have to be the domain of an overpowering alien intelligence. “Pluribus is so weird. A world in which everybody gets along. It's so sci-fi,” he said, invoking some of the discourse around the series. “But think about it: There's nothing weirder than our current reality. These past ten years, you can't write this stuff. I submit to you that a real world in which people get along is just as believable as what we've got now. And achievable.”Then Gilligan sharpened the point even further. “We will never agree on everything, but we can show respect to one another, maybe even kindness,” he said. “And we can stop listening to a relative few that tell us that’s for suckers and who get their power from dividing us.”TV Academy voters didn’t gather to send a message like a collective telegram. Instead, the Emmys are like an anonymous poll, elevating fiction as a referendum on reality. That’s what the Emmys honored this year. The ones who stand up, the ones who make peace, the ones who try to make things a little more fair, a little more sane, and a lot more humane. You can see it in the noncompetitive honorees like Michael J. Fox, who received the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award for his Parkinson’s disease activism. Everyone in the auditorium rose to their feet as he sat in a wheelchair, confined by the debilitating effects of the illness. It was a reminder that heroism is not about physical might, but resilience of spirit and generosity.Fox is a beloved actor across all walks of life, demographics, and ages, and yet in his speech he admitted that he tried to hide his ailment when he was first diagnosed decades ago, fearing it would cost him the audience he had built up over the years. That didn’t happen. “I was stunned by the support I had. The support from all of you,” Fox said. “It was so uplifting and made me feel like I could keep doing this. They couldn't take it away from me, and it's because you stood up for me.”That made him start thinking beyond his own situation. “I understood that accepting Parkinson’s didn’t mean I had to surrender to it,” he said. “It just meant I had to do everything I could for everyone living with this disease.”It’s not always about one person standing up for the many. Sometimes it’s the other way around.David Jon//Getty ImagesNothing made us happier last night than seeing Tom Pelphrey pick up the supporting actor in a drama Emmy for Task.All year long, the news has felt surreal. It doesn’t need a recap, but here’s one anyway. The planet seems to be ablaze on a near-constant basis, earthquakes and landslides have decimated whole cultures, wars rage in horrific conflicts around the world, and economic hardships pulverize those beyond these catastrophes. Situations that should be well within our control seem hopelessly out of control. (Fortunately, Lake Ontario has been renamed Lake America, so that’s one good thing that has helped everyone, right?)If there’s one show that captured the sense of compounding curses, it was Widow’s Bay, which ruled the comedy categories. It won best show, best lead actor for Matthew Rhys, supporting actress for Kate O’Flynn, and supporting actor for Stephen Root, while also collecting the awards for best comedy writing for creator Kate Dippold and comedy directing for Hiro Murai.Rhys played a mayor who finally opens his eyes to the fact that the quaint seaside town he’s trying to turn into a tourist destination is actually a paranormal hellzapoppin. He vows to do the right thing, and resists what he knows is hopelessly wrong—like sacrificing the sweet old lady whose demise might end the cycle of despair. Rhys was a two-time Emmy victor on Monday, also winning in the limited series category for The Beast in Me. (He is unequivocally evil in that show, but … once again, the exception proves the rule.)O’Flynn’s fussy, awkward Patricia and Root’s grizzled seafarer Wyck are both Widow’s Bay residents whose warnings go unheeded. They’re outcasts who have made their missteps, suffered delusions and downfalls, but still got up to sound the alarm and save the day. “This is for all the Patricias out there,” O’Flynn said in her speech. “See you at Sunset Cocktails to celebrate.”The actors and characters honored at Monday’s show were all complex and flawed in various ways, but overall they were striving to do their best to stay real and do the right thing when their world is falling apart.The epitome is Tom Pelphrey, who picked up the supporting actor in a drama Emmy for Task, where he plays a garbageman who pushes back against the inequity he feels by stealing from the drug lords who go otherwise unpunished. He’s not a simple, white-hatted hero. As Esquire’s Brady Langmann wrote recently, Pelphrey excels at playing “raw, big-hearted men at odds with themselves.” There’s no denying his character’s effort to even the scales in an indecent world.Even John Mulaney inadvertently underlined the night’s theme as he presented the award for best lead actor in a drama while jokingly reading from the 2006 book A Guy’s Guide to Being a Man’s Man, penned by the late Sopranos actor Frank Vincent. “A man’s man can be wearing the best clothes, drinking the finest wine and sitting with the most beautiful woman in Las Vegas,” Mulaney read aloud. “But if he doesn’t treat everyone around him with respect and class, he’s not a real man’s man. He’s just a jabroni in a good suit.”It started out like Mulaney was going to ridicule this book, but then it turns out—the Phil Leotardo actor and the guy who told Joe Pesci to “go home and get your shine box” in Goodfellas was actually on to something profound. (RIP, Mr. Vincent.)You could look at these various wins as coincidence. Certainly, none of this is intentional, so there’s no heavy-handed political statement behind it. TV Academy voters didn’t gather to send a message like a collective telegram. Instead, the Emmys are like an anonymous poll, elevating fiction as a referendum on reality. The awards illustrate what struck a nerve, what stood out, what had emotional weight and resonance. It tells us something about this era of hopelessness, when so much seems so wrong.We’ve recognized the darkness. Now we’re looking for the people who can pull us out of it.