One last mystery surrounding HBO’s juggernaut crime series True Detective has been solved. The Hollywood Reporter has learned that the network plans to submit creator Nic Pizzolatto’s gritty gothic crime saga for best drama series consideration for this year’s Emmys instead of in the recently-reinstated miniseries category -- despite the show’s anthology format and abbreviated first season at only eight total episodes.
True Detective, which has netted HBO giant ratings with an average 11 million viewers across platforms, is also the network’s most critically-acclaimed drama as of late. It's anchored, of course, by its two movie-star lead actors: Woody Harrelson, also a producer on the show, and Oscar winner for lead actor in Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey. (True Detective will have a different cast and storyline in season two.)
If HBO had chosen to submit it for miniseries, which the Academy announced on Feb. 20 that it was breaking away -- again -- from its made-for-TV movies competitors, True Detective would have seemed a lock for a win against lighter genre fare like FX’s American Horror Story: Coven (the Asylum installment of the franchise earned 17 Emmy noms last year, the most of any program), which has yet to win, though star Jessica Lange took home a trophy for the first season. HBO has scored more than a dozen wins for made for TV movies and miniseries in the last decade, including for last year’s Behind the Candelabra and 2013’s Game Change.
The drama series category at the Emmys, consistently the most crowded and competitive, was already poised for a shakeup this year.
Even though last year’s winner, AMC’s Breaking Bad is indeed eligible for one final Emmy haul (its last eight episodes aired in August, well after last year’s late-May deadline), the series will have been off the air for an entire year by the voters consider it in phase two of voting this summer.
PBS/Masterpiece’s Downton Abbey has yet to net a drama series win despite two nominations in the category, and HBO’s own Game of Thrones -- despite its monster ratings -- is facing its fourth round of contention. And of course, the four-time winner, AMC’s Mad Men, saw it stock fall overall in recent years with fewer overall nominations and two-in-a-row losses against Homeland and Breaking Bad.
HBO’s two other entrants for drama series -- The Newsroom and Boardwalk Empire -- didn’t make the cut for last year’s competition. And the network will still submit True Blood in the category, though the outgoing drama has not been nominated since 2010.
This really leaves Netflix’s House of Cards’ as Detective’s chief competition in the drama series category, as the second season of the streaming content provider was posted out Feb. 14 and earned overall positive buzz.
McConaughey is the only Academy Award winner this year to also top-line an Emmy-contending series. This can only give True Detective more of an edge as voters begin to consider the hundreds of competitors battling it out in this year’s Emmys race.
