{"id":856168,"date":"2026-08-13T04:44:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T04:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/856168\/"},"modified":"2026-08-13T04:44:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T04:44:10","slug":"the-emmys-rules-are-excluding-tons-of-great-international-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/856168\/","title":{"rendered":"The Emmys Rules Are Excluding Tons of Great International TV"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAmong the biggest stories of this year\u2019s Emmys is a show that wasn\u2019t even eligible to compete. Last month, the Canadian-made, HBO Max-distributed Heated Rivalry proved conspicuously absent from the drama series nominees, the vast majority of which were returning shows. Sure, the steamy queer hockey romance never screamed \u201cprestige.\u201d But as the streaming phenomenon of this past winter, in a TV season light on new breakouts, its awards<\/a> potential was undeniable. Star Connor Storrie, unknown a year ago, skyrocketed on the Academy\u2019s radar to the extent that he became the year\u2019s sole Saturday Night Live performer nominee, for his auspicious guest-hosting debut. Matt Damon and Ryan Gosling never stood a chance against voters\u2019 one shot to stump for the hunk behind Ilya Rozanov.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe drama race, at least, is filled with other buzzy shows, but Heated Rivalry\u2018s Emmys exclusion speaks to a larger issue that\u2019s preventing great work from being celebrated on TV\u2019s biggest night. Without American involvement at least as a co- production (Korea\u2019s Squid Game, for instance), these shows are punted to the International<\/a> Emmys, a separate ceremony plenty prestigious in its own right but carrying a fraction of the visibility.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe problem appears especially glaring in thinner fields that could desperately use a boost in the competition \u2014 like this year\u2019s limited series crop. I come not to bury The Beast in Me and All Her Fault\u2018s frothy fun, Beef\u2018s admirably thorny encore, Love Story\u2018s zeitgeist bull\u2019s-eye nor DTF St. Louis\u2018 subversive smarts. But taken together, it\u2019s an underwhelming lineup, and few contenders were remotely up to the task of taking their places. At least on the actual ballot. Should they have been deemed eligible, some of this past season\u2019s finest programming functioned as limited series, except they were produced outside the U.S. Ergo, \u201cInternational Emmy\u201d only.<\/p>\n

\n\tOscar nominee Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) directed the entirety of Mussolini: Son of the Century, and it\u2019s one of the British filmmaker\u2019s finest achievements, a maximalist and unbearably timely portrait of encroaching fascism. The epic eight-part Italian drama was widely acclaimed and streamed in the fall on Mubi, a relatively novice player in the episodic game.<\/p>\n

\n\tWright is not the only Hollywood-anointed filmmaker who could have competed this year under a different structure. Thomas Vinterberg, the Danish director behind the Oscar-winning Another Round, launched Families Like Ours at the Venice Film Festival in 2024 before Netflix acquired it stateside for release the following summer. The intimate seven-episode drama hit close to home, vividly depicting an environmental catastrophe and the political crises that follow. Even Netflix\u2019s massive reach was no match for stringent Academy rules.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd speaking of massive reach: The Emmys missed out on the chance to platform a genuine cross-continental smash in The Other Bennet Sister, Sarah Quintrell\u2019s infectious drama (based on Janice Hadlow\u2019s novel) imagining the life of Pride & Prejudice\u2018s most overlooked sister, Mary. After breaking ratings records in the U.K., its American launch on the multinational BritBox drove similarly unprecedented subscriber growth. \u201cIt\u2019s safe to say it\u2019s the biggest thing that we\u2019ve ever done,\u201d Robert Schildhouse, the BBC\u2019s highest-ranking American executive in the U.S., recently told THR. It\u2019s the Emmys\u2019 great loss to not have the revelatory star Ella Bruccoleri, to say nothing of a decorated supporting cast including Richard E. Grant and Indira Varma, represented at this year\u2019s show.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen it comes to submitting for Primetime Emmys versus International, some of these matters are strategic \u2014 those who know this beat may well remember that Netflix considered not submitting Baby Reindeer to the main awards until rave reactions started rolling in \u2014 while others, as in Heated Rivalry\u2018s case, are cut-and-dried. There may be hope for change, though: The separate organizations that oversee the two Emmy ceremonies \u2014 respectively known in short as the Academy and the National Academy \u2014 announced in July that they were entering \u201cexploratory talks\u201d to consider merging for the first time since 1977. That could put an end to this depressingly outdated segmentation.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn terms of media consumption, national boundaries have all but collapsed \u2014 something that studios like Netflix understand all too well. Expanding the Emmys\u2019 parameters would not only increase the mean quality of nominated work but also bring attention to great stuff flying under the radar. Just look at the example set of late by the Oscars: The film Academy has globalized, nominating more and more non-English-language movies for best picture every year \u2014 bracing, worthy titles like Brazil\u2019s I\u2019m Still Here and The Secret Agent, France\u2019s Anatomy of a Fall and Korea\u2019s Parasite.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOnce you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,\u201d Parasite\u2018s director Bong Joon Ho said at the 2020 Golden Globes ahead of his movie\u2019s Oscars triumph. Emmys, take note: The sentiment applies no less to TV.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Among the biggest stories of this year\u2019s Emmys is a show that wasn\u2019t even eligible to compete. Last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":856169,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3042,49,48,15065,242484,75,77],"class_list":["post-856168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-awards","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-emmy-awards","tag-emmys-2026","tag-entertainment","tag-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/856169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}