By Yulia Tulegenova
What the Subplots of 2025 Reveal About Television's New Order
An awards ceremony is never just about the awards. Beneath the shimmering surface of gowns, forced smiles, and tearful acceptances, the annual Emmy Awards function as a cultural seismograph, measuring the tremors shifting the landscape of modern entertainment. This year, the fault lines are particularly visible. Beyond the predictable suspense of who will take home the major statuettes, the 77th Emmy Awards tells a more intricate story about television’s evolving power dynamics, its blurring boundaries with cinema, and its own anxieties about the relevance of the very format designed to celebrate it.
To truly understand the state of television in 2025, one must look past the headline categories and into the curious clusters of competition. The supporting actor and actress fields have become a fascinating case study in the medium’s current creative model.
The Company You Keep
This year, the supporting actor in a drama series category is less a competition between individuals and more a direct confrontation between two of television’s most compelling ensembles. Three actors from the dystopian workplace thriller Severance - Trammell Tillman, Zach Cherry, and John Turturro - find themselves pitted against a trio from the sun-drenched satire The White Lotus: Sam Rockwell, Walton Goggins, and Jason Isaacs. It feels less like an individual contest and more like a proxy war between two distinct, brilliantly realised worlds.
This is not a coincidence. It is a direct reflection of a fundamental shift in prestige television. The era of the singular, dominant star vehicle has given way to the age of the showrunner as auteur, where the ensemble is the true protagonist. Shows like Severance and The White Lotus are meticulously cast ecosystems, where every part, no matter how seemingly small, is essential to the whole. The nominations simply acknowledge this reality. The supporting actress category reinforces the point, with four nominees - Carrie Coon, Parker Posey, Aimee Lou Wood, and Natasha Rothwell - hailing from The White Lotus. Rothwell’s insistence that the competition is entirely friendly speaks volumes. It suggests a shared sense of purpose, an understanding that their individual recognition is a product of their collective chemistry.
This trend isn't confined to the main ceremony. The Creative Arts Emmys saw the comedy guest actor race dominated by a single show, The Studio, with Bryan Cranston ultimately triumphing over a field that included his co-stars Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard. This concentration of talent points to television’s current confidence. It has become the primary destination for actors seeking complex, long-form character work, creating a density of quality that often leaves the Academy voters with an embarrassment of riches within a single programme.
The Tyranny of the Clock
Of course, for an institution celebrating the art of storytelling, awards shows themselves are often exercises in terrible pacing and stilted narrative. Perhaps the most telling subplot of this year’s Emmys is a radical, almost performatively aggressive, attempt to solve the ceremony’s most persistent problem: the long, rambling acceptance speech.
First-time host Nate Bargatze, a comedian known for his dry, observational style, has introduced a mechanism of almost cruel genius. He will begin the evening by donating a hundred thousand dollars to a children's charity. The catch is that for every second a winner runs past their allotted forty-five seconds, a thousand dollars will be deducted from the donation. To twist the knife, the children will reportedly be in the audience, watching the pot shrink in real time.
This is more than a clever gimmick. It is an open admission that the traditional format is broken. The gesture lays bare the inherent tension between a winner’s genuine, heartfelt gratitude and the audience’s dwindling attention span. It turns every acceptance speech into a high-stakes moral dilemma: is thanking your agent worth, as Bargatze puts it, "taking food from a child?" It's a darkly comedic solution to a problem that has plagued live broadcasts for decades, and it tacitly acknowledges that in the age of social media, a laundry list of thank-yous delivered on stage feels increasingly anachronistic.
The Blurring of the Screens
For decades, a clear hierarchy existed. Film was art; television was entertainment. Movie stars occasionally guest-starred on the small screen for a hefty paycheque or as a favour, but the traffic largely flowed one way. The 2025 nominations confirm, if any confirmation were still needed, that this wall has crumbled completely.
Harrison Ford, an actor who for fifty years has been the very definition of a cinematic leading man, is nominated for his first Emmy for his role in the comedy Shrinking. He is not an outlier. The list of first-time nominees reads like the cast list for a major film festival: Javier Bardem, Colin Farrell, Zoë Kravitz, Jake Gyllenhaal. This migration is the result of a simple inversion. As the film industry has become increasingly reliant on intellectual property and franchise blockbusters, television - particularly on streaming platforms - has become the natural home for the kind of mid-budget, character-driven drama that once defined independent cinema. For actors of a certain calibre, the most interesting roles are no longer on the big screen. They are in eight-part limited series.
An EGOT in the Wings
Amidst the currents of change, there are still moments that speak to old-fashioned endurance and legacy. At seventy-seven, Kathy Bates could become the oldest performer to win the Emmy for best actress in a drama. A win for her work in Matlock would be a testament to a career defined by its fierce versatility, from the chilling obsession of Misery to the camp extravagance of American Horror Story. It also brings into focus that most elusive of entertainment industry accolades: the EGOT. With an Oscar, a Tony, and two previous Emmys on her mantelpiece, Bates is just a Grammy away from joining that exclusive club.
In a sense, the pursuit of the EGOT feels like a relic from a more clearly defined era of entertainment. Yet its persistence highlights our fascination with artistic mastery across different forms. The same could be said for another artist on the verge of a similar milestone. Beyoncé's Emmy win for costume design on her "Beyoncé Bowl" special has already brought her halfway to an EGOT. The special itself is now nominated for Outstanding Variety Special, placing her in direct competition with her husband, Jay-Z, a producer on a rival halftime show. It’s a neat, headline-friendly detail, but it also speaks to the modern definition of the auteur: an artist whose vision is so total that it extends from the choreography and vocals right down to the very fabric of the costumes.
Ultimately, the Emmys are a reflection of what we watch, and right now, the screen is wider, the stories deeper, and the talent more fluid than ever before. These small subplots, these competitive quirks and structural experiments, are where the real story lies. The little gold statues are just trying to keep up.
