The Buzzmeter: Emmy Voters Play Politics and Further Alienate Viewers

Taylor Sheridan’s Landman and The Madison proved too successful with Emmy voters–both were completely shut out of this year’s nominations. We probably don’t have to think too hard to figure out why. The “Stop the Merger” crowd decided to cancel Paramount+, and that was that. If nothing else, they are the most predictable people on the planet.

The problem is that Landman’s success should not be ignored by an industry that supposedly cares about success. But if you no longer care about the people–or at least the “wrong” kind of people–then you won’t care much about actual success either. The awards industry, the Oscars, and the Emmys exist primarily to validate their own ideology. There is no real incentive toward broad success. The incentive is to tell the people inside the bubble what they want to hear about themselves.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? You are.

Over the past ten years–maybe longer–Hollywood has cut itself off from much of its audience. This has been true at the box office and true on streaming and television. Netflix is currently trying to figure out why there’s such a massive drop-off in viewership for its shows from Season 1 to Season 2. The answer isn’t that complicated: most of what Hollywood puts out is boring.

Keep in mind that Hollywood, and the industry that covers it, is largely unable to tell the truth about anything. It’s too dangerous. Doing so could mean career ruination. But if you can’t tell the truth, you can’t fix the problem. And that problem remains Hollywood’s deepening disconnection from the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.

We are living through extraordinary events. Every day feels like touching a live wire, and yet you’d never know it from the stories Hollywood chooses to tell. The only real freedom they seem to have left is in the horror genre–which is why Widow’s Bay was such a great show and did well at the Emmys, and why Obsession has made $300 million.

But in general, Hollywood–and the Oscars and Emmys–is about “us vs. them.” We’re the good guys, they insist, and those people over there are the bad guys. Inside this utopia, the rules are strident and thus boring. Most people already know the story they’ll tell, no matter the plot, because it’s almost always the same story. And it only appeals to a small portion of America.

The old monoculture that existed before the rise of the internet meant most Americans watched the same shows. In the Golden Age of television, for instance, Gunsmoke held the #1 spot for four consecutive seasons, from fall 1957 through spring 1961, typically drawing 42 to 45 million viewers per week.

That monoculture shifted after Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, as we began building our tribes on social media. Hollywood then constructed a new monoculture on the Left, isolating itself from the other half of the country. This only grew worse after 2016, when the industry openly took a side against half the nation.

The subsequent ratings and box office collapse tracks along these lines. The disconnect became even more extreme in 2020, when the entire industry imploded amid COVID and the Great Awokening. Hollywood has never fully recovered — and it’s possible it never will.

Unfortunately, the awards shows – the Oscars, Emmys, etc. – now function as an ideologically validated machine at best and a political weapon at worst. Rather than reward success (success? what’s that?), they reward compliance. They celebrate what’s doing well inside their insulated bubble.

Why was Paramount+ shut out? Because of the Left’s ongoing (and largely fantastical) war with Trump. They view Paramount, CBS, and similar outlets as a battle lost, so they refuse to touch any of their shows–no matter how popular, no matter how strong the performances. That’s reason number one.

The second reason is far more insidious: class snobbery. Hollywood has been given permission to sneer at the working class by swapping out class for race and gender. Thus, Oprah Winfrey can still be “oppressed,” while a poor white guy strung out on fentanyl in Wisconsin is labeled an “oppressor.”

Never in my life did the Left and Hollywood sneer at middle- and working-class Americans the way they do now. Even when they didn’t reach them with their sophisticated fare, they didn’t mock them. They remembered the great writers like John Steinbeck and filmmakers like Frank Capra. They remembered 1980s high school movies where the snotty rich kids were the villains. Not anymore.

This is exactly what makes Taylor Sheridan–or the Sheridan-Verse–such a remarkable one-man counterculture revolution. His shows play out on Paramount+ to roaring success. But say it with me: Success–what’s that? If you no longer care about box office or ratings, then why would anyone care about success?

Two of the most embarrassing snubs were Billy Bob Thornton in Landman and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Madison. (Full disclosure: Paramount bought ads on this site, which led me to watch their shows. I immediately understood what they were–and why they’d be rejected by Hollywood. They’re not woke. They’re made for the majority of viewers, not the minority of high-status coastal elites.)

It’s especially embarrassing because The Landman clears the room in terms of viewership. Here is a chart made by AI:

Only two other shows can even compete with Landman and The Madison. The fact that this doesn’t matter reveals everything. The kind of audience matters more than the numbers. Landman draws a white, older, male demographic. While many other nominees also draw mostly white audiences, theirs tend to be coastal elites. The wrong kind of audience simply can’t gain traction with Emmy voters.

We now live in a dramatically two-tiered culture, with the awards world–shockingly–siding with the upper class for the first time in my lifetime. It didn’t used to be this blatant. But once the monoculture broke apart around 2008, with streaming and social media hive minds taking over, ordinary people no longer mattered as much as the “right kind of people.”

That explains why Hollywood is in the mess it’s in. Even when it does connect with everyday Americans — as with Landman and The Madison–it doesn’t matter to the awards voters. They do not reward success.

Their variety show lineup features the usual suspects with some of the worst ratings in recent memory, yet it doesn’t matter. They serve a higher purpose: pushing Democratic Party politics. That is the only thing they truly care about.

I hope that, with these snubs, people in Hollywood can clearly see what has become of a once-mighty empire. When you no longer reward success, when your audience no longer matters, there is no incentive to do the best work. It isn’t that every great show has to be popular. It is that you can’t ignore shows that are popular because of politics.

The Hollywood bubble is shrinking, not expanding. Their elitism is alienating viewers across the board. If they actually rewarded success, the industry would be moving in a very different direction.