Awards season rolls on, with several guilds announcing their 2016 nominees, and Game of Thrones Season 6 is racking up nominations. Yesterday, both the Producers’ Guild and the Art Directors Guild announced nominees for the 2015-2016 television season, as well as the 2016 movie season. In both cases, Game of Thrones was on the ballet.
Over at the Producers’ Guild, the show is once again nominated for the prestigiously named “Norman Felton Award for Outstanding Producer of Episodic Television, Drama” award. Specifically, the producers nominated are David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Bernadette Caulfield, Frank Doelger, Carolyn Strauss, Bryan Cogman, Lisa McAtackney, Chris Newman, Greg Spence.
The show has been nominated for this award every season it has been on the air, but only last year did it finally take home the win for Season 5. Their competition includes the first season of HBO’s Westworld, along with the other major newcomer of 2016, Netflix’s Stranger Things. Rounding out the category are critical darlings Better Call Saul and House of Cards, both perennial nominees. The award show will be held on January 28, 2017.
Both Westworld and Stranger Things are lucky to have landed nominations this year—in previous years they would not have been eligible. After years of the PGA Awards following the traditional “TV Academy” schedule, which runs from June 1 of this year to May 31 of the next, they decided to go their own way and acknowledge that the TV schedule simply doesn’t work like that anymore. For this year only, the eligibility period runs from June 2015 to December 2016, with plans that next year they will switch to a January 1st to December 31st schedule going forward.
If this means Game of Thrones loses out to Westworld or Stranger Things, fans shouldn’t take it hard. The move to a Jan-Dec schedule next year means that, unlike over at the Emmys, Game of Thrones will not have a gap year in their eligibility for awards between Seasons 6 and 7.
Congrats to all the nominees, and may the best show win.