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The only Emmy that matters
Summary
Robert Elswit won Outstanding Cinematography for ‘Ripley’ at this year’s Emmy Awards. It may have been the one award that went to the right recipientRipley made me gasp. Netflix’s adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr Ripley is a wonder of black-and-white gorgeousness, and while leading man Andrew Scott may not have had anywhere near as much fun playing Tom Ridley as Matt Damon and the impossibly gorgeous Alain Delon before him, cinematographer Robert Elswit makes up for it with dazzling camerawork somehow reminiscent of both Caravaggio and Hitchcock — at the same time.
There’s Ripley, skulking through an Italian villa that’s more mausoleum than home. The light barely pierces the dimness, casting long, sharp shadows across the walls as if the very architecture is haunted by moral decay. Here, Ripley stands—half his face in blinding light, the other submerged in total darkness, a split identity visualised in real-time. Could a metaphor be any more unsubtle, yet so perfectly pitched?
Also read: ‘One begins each new work for a different reason. This novel is about confusion’
This is Robert Elswit — the master who won an Oscar for There Will Be Blood — taking Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro technique and deploying it for old-school noir style. An exquisite use of hard, natural light, light that cuts, that separates, that isolates. This isn’t just visual flair; it’s the storytelling engine. The textures, the composition, the play of light and darkness—it’s all so deliberate, so achingly beautiful that even a sociopath like Ripley seems like an innocent caught in the web of Italy’s Baroque grandeur.
Ripley, unsurprisingly, won an award for Outstanding Cinematography at this year’s Emmy Awards, which, for me, may have been the one award that mattered this year. The rest has been fraud.
This is the year The Bear (Disney+ Hotstar) — a devastatingly bleak series about suicide and self-flagellation, swept the ‘Comedy’ category of the Emmy Awards, streaming in India on Lionsgate Play. The first season of The Bear had won Emmys too, but the second was an almost gratuitously grieving season, serving up family trauma and failure. Was it good television? By all means. Was it funny? No, chef.
How did this farce come to pass? The Emmys have a long-standing tradition of classifying shows as Comedy or Drama based on the arbitrary metric of runtime. This antiquated rule states that any show with episodes clocking in at 30 minutes or less gets slotted into Comedy, while hour-long episodes are deemed Drama. Never mind tone, content, or intent—if you’re short, you’re funny.
Having said that, The Bear episodes mostly inch close to 40 minutes, and its most loved — and most awarded — episode of season two, the devastating ‘Fishes’ episode set around a Christmas Dinner, is more than an hour long. So how does it qualify? This is a transparent and shameful case of Category Fraud, where the producers submit their show in the wrong category to give it a better chance of winning. The Bear may not have been able to slug it out with Shogun (Disney+ Hotstar) in the Drama category, but had much betters odds against Comedy nominees — most of whom (rightfully) did not take themselves as seriously.
Category Fraud is not new. Every year at The Oscars, for instance, actors who may command and headline a film — like, say, the late great Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight — head to the Supporting categories in order to improve their chances. The Comedy/Drama debate isn’t new either, but I believe the outcry over The Bear being classified this way is so loud only because several viewers — myself included — were left devastated and wrenched by The Bear, and seeing it compete with Only Murders In The Building (Disney+ Hotstar) feels pathetic.
(Also, Season Three of The Bear is significantly underwhelming — another reason for us to fall out of love with it.)
Emmy hosts Eugene and Dan Levy — the father-son stars of the actual comedy Schitt’s Creek (Netflix) — referenced The Bear’s lack of laughs rather excellently in their opening monologue. “I know some of you might be expecting us to make a joke about whether The Bear is a comedy," Eugene deadpanned, “but in true spirit of The Bear we will not be making any jokes."
The best victors of the 2024 Emmys were not old favourites but new champions. The triumphs of outliers brought a sense of genuine progress to an otherwise familiar evening. Anna Sawai, the first Japanese actress to win Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Shōgun, delivered an emotional speech that felt like a watershed moment. “For all the women who expect nothing and continue to be an example for everyone," she said, nodding to those who often go unrecognized in the industry.
Baby Reindeer (Netflix) creator and actor Richard Gadd brought the house down with his underdog victory. "If Baby Reindeer has proved anything, it’s that there’s no set formula to this — that you don’t need big stars, proven IP, long-running series, catch-all storytelling to have a hit," he declared to resounding cheers. "So, take risks, push boundaries, explore the uncomfortable," Gadd added to his inspiring conclusion. "Dare to fail in order to achieve."
Overall, it was a night of fraud. The night The Bear and its sandwich shop of sadness stole from shows that actually dared to make us laugh. Like I said, however, Elswit losing — for a show about a fraud — would have been far more egregious. It is incredible that The Bear won Comedy awards, but we must choose light, or shadow. Believe it or not, or Ripley.
Streaming tip of the week:
Despite The Bear piling up Comedy prizes, the Outstanding Comedy award went instead to Hacks (JioCinema) a sharp-tongued series about an older comedian, played marvellously by Jean Smart, and the evolving nature of comedy itself. Do watch.
