What SNL's Winning Streak Reveals About The Emmys' Failure

The sliding scale nomination process backfires on the very "inclusion" it aims to boost.

PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

On September 12th, 2022, Saturday Night Live won their 6th Emmy in a row for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, beating out their one lone fellow nominee, A Black Lady Sketch Show. If this sounds familiar, this exact same matchup happened last year, for Emmys 2021. In an entertainment world of a plethoric multitude of content, how have only two shows been nominated for an Emmy category for the last two years in a row? The answer is due to The Emmy’s abysmal failure of a sliding scale nomination system.

The first year SNL won was for their debut season at the 1976 Emmy Awards. This was the OG (“Original”) of the OG Cast - we’re talking people like Dan Akyroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, and Gilda Radner. FREAKING LEGENDS. That year, notably, SNL beat out a single fellow nominee as well - The Carol Burnett Show (upsetting the critically-acclaimed series from a threepeat win.) But it wasn’t until nearly two decades later in 1993 that SNL finally picked up their second Emmy - with another LEGENDARY cast: Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Mike Myers, Tim Meadows, Chris Rock, Dana Carvey, and even Rob Schneider, to name a few.

Then, starting in the late-90s, the monopolies of the late night talk shows began to take over the category: Late Show with David Letterman (1994, 1998-2002), The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (2003-2012), and The Colbert Report (2013-2014.) It became a nearly predictable race, with the same show winning over and over again. (Not much has really changed in that respect, actually.) Which is why, in 2015, The Emmys decided to split the Outstanding Variety Series into two separate categories: Outstanding Variety Talk Series & Outstanding Variety Sketch Series.  The Outstanding Variety Talk Series category would go on to be dominated by John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, winning SEVEN years in a row. (The only other winner was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which won in 2015 for its final season.) But the Outstanding Variety Sketch Series…well, that opened up a WORLD of possibilities for all those little sketch shows out there, with the first two winners being Inside Amy Schumer (2015) and Key & Peele (2016.) SNL finally broke its two-plus-decades losing streak with a win in 2017 (with another LEGENDARY cast - Kate McKinnon, Kenan Thompson, Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant, Colin Jost, Leslie Jones, Michael Che, etc.…basically the cast we know today), and won again in 2018 and 2019 against a strong palette of other shows, including Portlandia, Drunk History, Documentary Now!, and Tracey Ullman’s Show.

THE EMMYS 2018

Then, in 2020, The Emmys introduced a sliding scale nomination process. They stated this was “to align the nomination selection process across all awards categories and to allow for more inclusion in the recognition of excellence.” For 1-19 submissions in a category, there would be 0-4 nominations, 20-80 submissions would have 5 nominations, 81-160 submissions would have 6 nominations, 161-240 submissions would have 7 nominations, and 241+ would have 8 nominations. This resulted in several categories having up to eight nominees, but it seemed to have backfired for the Outstanding Variety Sketch Series category, which only had fourteen submissions that first year of the new process. So what once was a healthy sampling of six nominees per year was chopped in half to only three in 2020: Drunk History, A Black Lady Sketch Show, and SNL (winning again.) The next year took another hit - 9 submissions equalled just two nominees, and in 2022 it went down even further to 8 submissions total. For an “inclusive” new policy aimed at more diversity, it backfired miserably when you take into account that nearly two-thirds of the 2022 submissions were minority-created (A Black Lady Sketch Show, The Amber Ruffin Show, PAUSE with Sam Jay, That Damn Michael Che, Ziwe) – but only one-half of the nominees reflected that. Oops, Emmys.

The Emmys must refine their sliding scale process so that the smaller entry categories are allowed more nominations - even just for the simple fact that two shows going against each other barely even looks like competition. Set a minimum - three at least. When it was SNL vs. Drunk History vs. A Black Lady Sketch Show, there was at least some suspense of a potential upset. Let the little sketch shows out there have better odds of winning, and you might get even more entries because of it, growing the category further and further to become like the healthy plump offerings of 2015-2019 - with maybe even a new winner to dethrone Saturday Night Live in 2023.