How Game of Thrones paved the way for awards recognition for genre shows

Once upon a time, it was considered a simple fact that if your TV show involved sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes, monsters or anything like that, it probably wasn’t going to earn much hardware at the Emmys. Then came Game of Thrones, a full-on fantasy series with dragons and zombies and everything that netted a record 59 statues, including several wins of Best Drama Series, long considered the top award of the night.

A decade on, and genre series are the hottest ticket in Hollywood. Amazon is spending billions on its Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time shows, Netflix is pouring money into series like The Witcher and Shadow and Bone, and of course, superheroes are all the rage everywhere.

And industry experts expect the awards hardware to follow. Speaking to Variety, awards agency head Rich Licata cited Game of Thrones as the show that “really broke through the glass ceiling for genre shows” so far as awards go.

The Boys, WandaVision and more show how attitudes about genre shows are changing

And as we said, lots of creators are walking through the door it opened. Take Eric Kripke, who created the genre show Supernatural, which went on for 15 seasons without much in the way of awards recognition. His new Amazon superhero drama The Boys stands a much better chance of getting acknowledged. “Genre hasn’t particularly changed that much, the world around it has,” he said.

The Boys is a smash-bang action series featuring exploding heads and eviscerated whales, but it also digs into more serious topics like the cult of celebrity and white supremacy. Jac Schaeffer, producer of fellow superhero series WandaVision, is all for this Trojan horse strategy. “The superhero space especially is a wonderful and playful place to examine really large issues,” she said. “Right now, genre is a way for heavier themes to be more palatable. I think it’s a way to make these stories of humanity and what happens to us here on this planet a little bit more exciting and imaginative, and to add complexity and visual thrills.“

Again, the strategy of using sci-fi and fantasy to address relevant issues isn’t new; it’s just that awards voters are taking it more seriously now. For instance, Licata talked about how during the Cold War, “Godzilla movies were about the great communist threat,” but you didn’t see those films getting many Oscars.

Another important difference is the kinds of people who get to make these stories. Take Little Marvin, the creator of the horror series Them on Amazon, which is centered around a Black family in the 1950s. “I’ve wanted this for a very long time,” he said. “I think the landscape was different even five years ago, but 15 years ago there was no Lena Waithe, no Ava DuVernay, no Ryan Murphy — all of these folks who are unabashedly using their voices to tell the stories they want to tell. That gave a guy like me, who was just watching TV and loving it, permission to go, ‘OK wait, what if I did that?’”

According to Kripke, there’s also a greater “tolerance for risk-taking. You get to say more subversive things and you get to say edgier things than you can ever say in any other form because it’s Trojan-horsed in these fantastic elements. And the business model of streaming, for us anyway, is ‘be noisy’ so people can come into the service. So, we’re actually encouraged to be subversive and a little more dangerous. And with risk-taking, I think, comes a little more attention.”

All of this makes it an exciting time to be a TV fan, and particularly a fan of genre fare, which is fine by us.

The nominees for the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards will be announced on July 13, 2021, with the ceremony to go down on September 19. We’ll be keeping an eye out.

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