They don’t have a shot, but they should. It’s not too late for Emmy voters to get onboard with these 11 performers.
Photo: Apple TV+
Emmy voters are just like you and me. Which is to say: They like what they like, and they don’t have enough hours in the day to keep up with every damn TV show. Even with the production pipeline slowing down in post-strike years, the sheer mass of TV shows angling for Emmy attention in these late spring months is intense. Which is where the “For Your Consideration” campaigns come in, directing attention to the contenders with whom Emmy voters need to familiarize themselves. The irony, of course, is that the shows and stars with the heaviest FYC action are hardly the ones who need it. Nobody requires a billboard to remember that Jean Smart or Noah Wyle are up for Emmys this year.
It’s both understandable and irritating that the Emmys conversation narrows so quickly around this time of year, with wagons circling around a dozen or so dramas, a dozen or so comedies, and at most ten limited series. The acting hopefuls almost always come exclusively from those shows. I’m guilty of this behavior too! So each season, I try to take a moment to survey the excellence found in less hyped performances from all over the TV landscape: highbrow shows, lowbrow shows, hits, flops, shows that premiered all the way back in summer 2025. The ones that get dismissed from Emmy consideration because prognosticators assume they don’t stand a chance, an assumption that all but ensures those shows never get a shot.
In the interest of breaking this vicious cycle — or merely tilting at that windmill for a week — a few of my colleagues and I have put together a list of underestimated performances (some of which charged into the Emmys season late, while others have been around for months) that deserve further Emmy consideration. (To qualify for inclusion, a performer should not have been previously nominated in the specific role being recognized here, and should not currently be in Gold Derby’s top 10 predictions for an Emmys category — or top 8 for Limited Series designations.) It’s not too late for Emmy voters to check these shows out. Voting for the nominations doesn’t begin until June 11. Consider them! At the very least don’t not consider them.
Photo: Steve Dietl/Netflix/Everett Collection
Sometimes being a great television performer does not involve embodying a strung-out high schooler or the newest employee in a surreal office mystery. Sometimes, the best TV performance is, simply, the most fun. Case in point: Malin Akerman’s delicious work as Margo Banks on The Hunting Wives. The actress walks the show’s fine line between drama and satire perfectly, never seeming to take the occasion too seriously but also refusing to smirk at the camera. Britney Snow, playing our point-of-view character, has to be entirely entranced by the world of Texas wives she’s entering into, while Akerman is the person who defines that space. She puts on a ridiculous Southern accent, seduces Snow by wading luxuriously into a pool, shoots guns, and wears an obvious wig that’s never acknowledged. She almost always appears to be having a good time on screen, but she never seems too far in on the joke to the point of lapsing into parody or diminishing the show’s stakes. Basically, no matter how soap-y the show gets, Akerman permits the audience to buy into and sincerely enjoy the Hunting Wives ridiculousness. This is not Method acting dripping in prestige, but it is perfectly calibrated technique for its genre, and that’s worth rewarding.
— Jason P. Frank
Yes, Rose Byrne only recently completed her Oscar-season tour collecting accolades and a heap of prizes for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. And yes, she’s currently nominated for a Tony Award for Fallen Angels. But this is no time for awards fatigue. Not when Byrne is at risk for being overlooked yet again for one of the flat-out funniest performances on TV, in Francesca Delbanco and Nicholas Stoller’s Platonic. Reunited with her Neighbors director (Stoller) and co-star (Seth Rogen), Byrne delivers a potent reminder of what a versatile comedic talent she is. In the show’s second season, Sylvia’s burgeoning event-planning business put her on a collision course with her platonic bestie’s bad-idea wedding, leaving her plenty of space to stumble and spin out within the show’s blessedly joke-heavy sensibility. In a sea of prestige actresses doing dramedy, Byrne is a true comedic talent, sporting incredible instincts for finding the funniest angle for Sylvia to take in her line readings or gestures. Her chemistry with Rogen isn’t surprising, given what we saw in the Neighbors movies, but it’s still top-tier comedic rapport. That this show got buried after its first season because Apple thought they had a better shot at an Emmy for Byrne with Physical was unfortunate. This year, there’s no excuse. — Joe Reid
Photo: Aaron Epstein/Peacock
The Paper could have been just another disposable, ill-guided legasequel or nostalgia reboot, crumpled up and thrown in the wastebin of broadcasting like so much, um, paper. In some ways it sticks faithfully to the familiar Office formula: there is a Stanley stand-in, a budding Jim-and-Pam slowburn romance stand-in, relations between the desk jobs and the warehouse, and Oscar reprising his role as Oscar. But the show’s stroke of genius and individual artistic imprint comes from the decision of having their Michael Scott replacement be a beautiful, delusional Italian woman named Esmerelda Grand. It is a role that comes completely out of left field and it could have only been played by Sabrina Impacciatore, the Italian comic actress who brought so much pathos to the manager role on White Lotus season two. No one on TV has more surprising and innovative line readings, or is more deliciously loveable in her scheming. Impacciatore plays Esmerelda, who sticks out in drab Toledo like a rhinestoned coke spoon in a haystack, as a fish-out-of-water who nevertheless thinks she owns dry land. Perhaps her inventive, clownish take on the character can be attributed to her own confession that, at table reads, “I don’t know what’s going on … I don’t even know what the episode’s about!” Or maybe it’s that, as she told Vulture, she bases her performance on Tweety Bird. Whatever it is, Impacciatore works her magic to do something truly new in a tired format, and it was the best comedic performance on TV this season. — Rebecca Alter
Sometimes being sizzling hot with good hair ought to be enough. But that would be underselling the devilishly appealing Daniel Ings as Ser Lyonel Baratheon, a.k.a. the “Laughing Storm,” a.k.a. resident good-time guy in HBO’s slim Game of Thrones spinoff. Ings attacks every scene with a conspiratorial glint, the kind of presence who makes the camera feel lucky to have caught him. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms adapts George R.R. Martin’s “Dunk and Egg” novellas into a kind of annual Slow Horses-style stopgap while House of the Dragon grinds through production. Its compact structure means there are few guarantees beyond the central Dunk-and-Egg pairing; supporting characters may vanish as quickly as they arrive. That would be a shame, because Ings is a lightning bolt whose presence is enough to make an argument for the entire enterprise. The gift of AKOTSK is making Westeros feel alive again, not just brutal but populated by messy, vivid people trying to wring pleasure and meaning from a miserable world. That’s what Lyonel Baratheon brings to the story, and it’s exactly what Ings brings to the show: sweat, vitality, and the sense that somewhere just offscreen, another real party is happening. — Nicholas Quah
Photo: Prime
No one this year has been a scene-stealer quite like Guz Khan. In Bait, series creator and writer Riz Ahmed plays Shah, a down-on-his-luck actor who tries out for the role of James Bond and sees his life changed — positively and negatively — as a result. Suddenly he’s a paparazzi target, which could be good for his profile, but he’s also the target of Islamophobic vitriol and a hate crime that affects his family. Shah’s closest ally (and the person most willing to call Shah on his lies to himself and others) is his cousin Zulfi, a gigantic character who Khan energizes with fast-talking charm, sarcastic asides, and an assessing glare that can cut through anyone’s defenses. Zulfi is an iconoclast and a hustler, a man who dreams of opening a Muslims-only version of Uber and who, even in the face of Shah’s elitism and English society’s broader wariness, holds onto an unshakable optimism. In their scenes together, Ahmed plays straight man so Khan can go huge, all breezy confidence and street smarts combined as a defense against the countless stereotypes the bearded, accented, proudly Muslim Zulfi must face every day. Khan yanks attention away from his castmates in every scene, but not in a selfish way; it’s just that the force of his personality is so undeniable. In my dream world where Emmys voters bother to watch Bait, Khan is a shoo-in. — Roxana Hadadi
It’s crazy to think that Leighton Meester doesn’t have an Emmy, let alone an Emmy nomination, but we live in a crazy world. Teen Choice Awards for her time as iconic mean girl Blair Waldorf on Gossip Girl? Yes. But Emmys? No. I Love LA is probably too abrasive and specific a show for Emmys voters to buy into wholeheartedly, but Meester’s performance feels like a great entryway: a veteran TV star poking fun at her own fictional persona. In Rachel Sennott’s HBO comedy, Meester plays Alyssa, Sennott’s boss and mentor, at a talent agency aptly called Alyssa180. Alyssa is rose gold personified: the ultimate millennial, forever girlboss, living as though 2015 were alive and well. Unfortunately for her, Sennott’s Maia — driven and desperate and very much Gen Z — gives her a real run for her money, and Alyssa is forced to reckon with all of her timely shortcomings, including a wrenching and hilarious episode where we get a glimpse of her charade of a home life. Meester plays all of this with a convincing lack of self-awareness and hilarious desire to keep the walls from closing in around her. She’s the perfect supporting player in I Love LA’s striver satire: a pro who’s there to remind us she’s still at top of her game, even if Alyssa isn’t. — Fran Hoepfner
Photo: Simon Ridgway/HBO
How will Industry survive without Eric Tao? The series is a miasma of orphans, failsons, and fuckups, all tragic figures who turn to capitalism to heal them. Of course, it never does (which should tell audiences how series co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay feel about the financial structures they’re critiquing), and no one embodied that inner discontent quite like Ken Leung’s American striver. Since the beginning, Leung’s Eric was a fascinating mess, a man who carried water for some of banking’s worst people and knew that they were the worst people, but still could only find meaning in the work. By season four, Eric was a multimillionaire, and he was also miserable, an imbalance of success and despair that Leung conveyed through his miles-away gaze, the slump in his shoulders when he thought no one was watching, and the despondency of his line deliveries. The quietness with which he admits to protege and sorta daughter Harper Stern (Myha’la) that nothing, really, has made him feel as alive as the market triumphs he’s engineered with her is a heartbreaking moment of honesty and moral complexity that only someone as immersed as Leung could pull off. Tao literally walks into the sunset midway through Industry’s fourth season, and with uncertainty about whether he’ll return to the series for its fifth and final go-round, this is probably the Emmys’ last opportunity to recognize Leung’s work. They better invest. — R.H.
The Boroughs is not beating the “Golden Years Stranger Things” allegations. But it transcends that glib, if accurate, assessment almost completely on the backs of its seasoned ensemble, who collectively navigate the show’s tricky tonal balance and manage to sell its dubiously CGI-ed horrors. As the lead apparent, Alfred Molina is the most obvious candidate for a nod — especially if The Boroughs submits in Limited Series, where he’s previously picked up supporting nominations for The Normal Heart and Feud: Bette and Joan. But Geena Davis, Denis O’Hare, and Clarke Peters would all be equally fitting in the supporting categories, while Alfre Woodard’s role gives her a solid claim to Lead Actress. It’s unlikely that The Boroughs would pull off that kind of acting-category sweep, but if it did, it would be apt recognition of the series’ defining, and best, feature. — Genevieve Koski
Photo: Netflix
You wouldn’t think there would be a ton of room for the acting to impress in Haley Z. Boston’s Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, a fun but often structurally challenging limited series that often feels like it would be more effective if it were a movie. And yet as the series expands from and twists around its simple horror concept (a wedding at the groom-to-be’s family house in the woods is fated for a titular dark catastrophe), Morrone’s performance as Rachel is able to shoulder the weight of quite a bit of backstory and a complicated endgame. As Rachel learns about the family curse that threatens her and her betrothed, Morrone digs in with emotional complexity and real grit. She avoids the polar horror tropes of trembling victim and unlikely badass, keeping the audience from ever being too sure of where her arc is headed. And she has interesting, varied chemistry with pretty much everyone in the main cast. Genre bias against horror has Emmy pundits discounting her chances out of hand, but she deserves to be this year’s breakthrough TV actress. — J.R.
The Netflix adaptation of Julia May Jonas’s novel is one of those cilantro experiences in entertainment. People who like a show with a high concept voicey narrator that’s not afraid to crawl up its own butt will have no issue with it. But Vladimir is not built for universal appeal. You know what is universally appealing? John Slattery in Vladimir, wandering around on the sidelines, knocking back cocktails and running out to the backyard every hour or so to make sure his lettuce has been adequately watered. Slattery has a knack for giving big performances that also feel nonchalant, almost like he’s been there in that backyard the whole time yelling about lettuce, and a TV production just happened to set up shop around him. Few actors can also plausibly pull off a plotline about professor harassment where you completely buy that he harassed his students and yet still find him fun, for some reason? It’s baffling. He’s great. — Kathryn VanArendonk
Photo: Apple TV
Katie Dippold’s comic smoothie of every horror movie you’ve ever loved is the best debut this year by a wide margin, and what makes it feel built for a long, healthy run is the sprawling ensemble inhabiting its cursed New England island community. In a community overflowing with crusty weirdos, Kate O’Flynn’s Patricia emerges as the undeniable standout. O’Flynn gets a lot to work with: both the beleaguered right hand to Matthew Rhys’ Mayor Tom and the operator of a bookmobile (named, wonderfully, the “Pattiwagon”), Patricia is a cross between Carrie, a final girl, and a witch archetype — a lonely social outcast yearning for acceptance whom you totally buy as perpetually teetering on the edge of something much darker. That tension electrifies the standout fourth episode, “Beach Reads,” where a grimoire masquerading as a self-help book inspires Patricia to throw a wildly successful party that nearly culminates in human sacrifice. It’s both her showcase and the season’s statement piece: a finely calibrated half hour that distills everything funny, eerie, and off-kilter about Widow’s Bay, and O’Flynn carries every single one of those beats and tonal pivots with remarkable ease .Like many of the town’s residents, Widow’s Bay initially frames Patricia as a punchline who later blossoms into a complete character. It’s so fun to watch how O’Flynn hides that evolution in plain sight. I wasn’t familiar with the British actress, but my colleague Kathryn VanArendonk says she’s also great in My Lady Jane, a one-season Prime Video historical fantasy romance adaptation, and I’m excited to check it out. Her Widow’s Bay turn is the kind that makes me want to see everything she’s ever done. — N.Q.
Speaking of Don’t Not Consider, Keke Palmer did the work of making sure that Emmy voters were aware that she’s in the running for her performance on The Burbs when she participated in The Hollywood Reporter’s comedy-actress roundtable and dropped a “2 Girls, 1 Cup” reference. THR’s annual gathering of Emmy hopefuls kicked off this week, summoning The Comeback’s Lisa Kudrow to commune with the children: Quinta Brunson (Abbott Elementary), Hannah Einbinder (Hacks), Rachel Sennott (I Love L.A.), Ashley Padilla (Saturday Night Live), and Palmer. In a discussion that Padilla started about a secret Groundlings show for gross-out comedy, Palmer summoned the ancient name of one of the forbidden Millennial texts. “They must be on some ‘2 Girls 1 Cup,’” Palmer said, referencing the notorious 2007 viral video of people reacting to Brazilian scat porn.
The 2G1C reference activated the Einbinder/Brunson/Sennott corner of the table into a cacophony of nostalgic chatter on how impressionable millennials were raised in a wild west full of nasty poop memes, as Kudrow — either unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the reference — busied herself in a sidebar with Padilla. It was a forceful reminder that even when repping an under-discussed Peacock series, Palmer is a viral moment waiting to happen, whether she’s declaring “Defying Gravity” to be a slave hymn or disclaiming familiarity with war criminals. Given how great she is on the publicity trail, her eventual Emmy moment seems inevitable.
