Today’s Guardian has an article by TV reviewer Stuart Heritage, who complains that Better Call Saul, “one of the best things on TV”, has been consistently snubbed by the Emmys and Golden Globes, despite being nominated a total of 52 times.
Dopers, what do you consider to be the absolute best scripted TV series that never won a major award? (For American shows, let’s follow Heritage’s lead and say that the Emmys and Golden Globes are the relevant major awards.) To be clear, this thread isn’t for rattling off a list of any old TV shows that were popular but failed to win an award; don’t nominate a show unless you think that it, above all other shows, was most deserving of commendation.
My nomination would be The Wire: 0 Golden Globe nominations, 2 Emmy nominations, 0 wins.
Well, I think you’ve got the answer bracketed right there. At first, reading that BCS had never won an award like these, I thought, “Well, that’s obviously the answer”, but then I hit the last line, and yeah, now “The Wire” is obviously the answer.
I’d have a hard time even mentioning two shows better than these, so that closes out the nominations
Are we talking just Emmys and Golden Globes? Looking on IMDB, I see that Community had a handful of Emmy nominations, and only won one, for outstanding animation. (So that’s a major award, but not what I would consider a major category.) I don’t see any Golden Globe nominations.
It used to piss me off that Jim Parsons won the best actor in a comedy series Emmy several years in a row when Danny Pudi was acting rings around him and got no recognition at all.
Well, using Emmys and Golden Globes was just a suggestion based on the precedent set by the Guardian article I linked to. Obviously that criterion wouldn’t apply well to British shows, so for those we might instead use the rule that the show must never have won a BAFTA. For Canadian shows, maybe we stipulate that they must not have won a Gemini.
If you want to suggest different criteria for American shows, I suppose we could discuss that. For instance, despite being hugely influential, the original Star Trek series never won an Emmy or a Golden Globe, though it did win several Hugo Awards, which some people might consider prestigious enough.
Understood. I was just trying to head off arguments about what’s considered “major” or not. But it’s probably not something that can be pinned down. For example some people might consider “People’s Choice” to be a major award, but I wouldn’t. And of course as you say TV in different countries will have different awards.
I mean, given that (a) it is the best TV show, period, and (b) it never won a major award, it is clearly the best TV show that never won a major award.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia based an entire episode around spoofing the fact that the show had never won an Emmy or other award — “The Gang Desperately Tries to Win an Award” from Season 9.
