The 68th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards aired on Sunday, Sept. 18, and this award ceremony crossed some big milestones for diversity in Hollywood.
Most notably, Rami Malek of USA’s Mr. Robot became the first non-white actor in 18 years to win the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series award. This is a huge departure from the Academy Awards earlier in the year, when the unofficial hashtag #OscarsSoWhite took over the internet.
Additionally, Jeffrey Tambor won the award for the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for his role as a transgender woman in Amazon’s Transparent. In his acceptance speech, he called for more stories about transgender people and for Hollywood to give transgender actors more roles.
“I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a transgender woman on television,” Tambor said in his speech.
On top of that, four LGBT+ identifying women took home Emmys: Kate McKinnon for her work on Saturday Night Live, Jill Soloway for her direction of the show Transparent, Sarah Paulson for her performance on The People v. OJ Simpson and Executive Producer of American Crime Story Nina Jacobson.
Should I compare these winners to those that took home Oscars in February? Do I need to? We all know what that list looked like.
Why is it that our mainstream films overwhelmingly feature straight, white, cisgender actors? I’m not trying to claim that television has beat racism or sexism or discrimination of all kinds, but there’s definitely a huge disparity in the levels of diversity and representation in television and film.
This isn’t new, though. Television has always been more progressive — Will and Grace and Ellen changed the game for the LGBT+ community both on-screen and off. There’s still a long way to go as far as representation goes, but television networks are actively working to make changes to their programming. On the other hand, it feels like every movie released is about a white man doing something, again, but this time with a vengeance!
TV has always been a safer place for creators to take risks in their storytelling because the audience for any given episode of a show is much smaller than the expected audience of a feature film.
As more and more writers realize the benefits of television and head from the big to the small screen, viewers get more and more variety in what they can choose from to watch. So producers and networks have to compete for our views, and lately they’ve been headed towards putting out more content that might appeal to niche audiences instead of a few shows that will appeal to the masses. That’s how we ended up with shows like Mr. Robot, about a hacker; Transparent, about a transgender woman and her family; and Orphan Black, about clones. And that’s how these “niche” shows ended up receiving national recognition at the Emmy Awards this week.
I think the advent and quick acceptance of streaming services for our television viewing pleasures have ushered in a new golden age of television. On Netflix alone, you can feed your hunger for strong superhero women (Jessica Jones), new adult stories, racially diverse stories (Master of None) and quick-witted comedies about depression and cartoon horse-men (Bojack Horseman). These shows aren’t going to appeal to everyone, but you’re bound to find something that you’ll like, and that’s what Netflix is trying to do.
If traditional television networks take a note from the streaming services’ books and start bringing us diverse stories with diverse casts, maybe they’d stop ceding all their Emmy nominations to cable and streamed shows.
The American public is unique and diverse, and we deserve to watch television shows and movies that reflect all of these identities. Come on Hollywood, do more.
Gillian Lelchuk is a junior Writing Seminars and mathematics double major from Los Alamitos, Calif. She is the Opinions Editor.
