23 Emmy Nominations for "The White Lotus" Is Too Many

On Tuesday morning, the nominees for the 77th Annual Emmy Awards were announced, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Severance led the pack with a whopping 27 nods. The Penguin was close behind with 24, followed by The Studio and The White Lotus at 23 nominees apiece.

It’s the second season in a row that the Mike White anthology series has earned 23 nominations, but this year those accolades feel a little undeserved. Season 3 paled in comparison to the previous two efforts; the writing was lazy, the plot was all over the place, and despite some strong performances, there wasn’t enough character development for its dramatic ending to feel earned. A handful of prestige shows dominating all of the categories is nothing new — think about how many cast members of The Bear have been nominated for their work on the show over its first three seasons — but generally that’s because they’re objectively great. It’s hard to look at the 23 nods for The White Lotus this year without thinking that they’re simply the result of name recognition and popularity rather than actual merit.

This time around, The White Lotus received eight acting nominations: Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Sam Rockwell, Natasha Rothwell and Aimee Lou Wood all got supporting acting nominations, and Scott Glenn — who had just seven minutes and 53 seconds of total screen time as the father of Walton Goggins’s Rick — was nominated for best guest actor in a drama. Some of them feel more deserving than others, and they only serve to highlight the Emmys’ continued category problems.

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There’s been a lot of fuss over whether or not The Bear is a comedy, but The White Lotus competing in the Drama categories feels just as egregious. The series was moved from the Limited Series categories to the Drama classification after its second season despite being an anthology because having some characters who appear in multiple seasons — like Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya — makes it ineligible in the Limited Series category. That feels like an odd loophole for a show that famously has a different setting, story and primary cast every season, but even if we can overlook it, how can we call it a drama instead of a comedy?

Take Parker Posey, for example: Her character stole every scene she was in, so in theory she deserves some sort of recognition for her performance. But she was primarily comic relief. How are we supposed to compare her work to that of, say, Patricia Arquette in Severance or Katherine LaNasa in The Pitt, both of whom are nominated for far more dramatic roles?

The slew of nominations for The White Lotus feels like an attempt by Emmy voters to get the series as a whole — rather than the actual disappointing third season — some recognition and ushers its stars onto their red carpet. Despite receiving almost two dozen nominations, the show’s second season was virtually shut out during the 75th Emmys by the massively popular (and, it’s worth emphasizing, excellent) final season of Succession. The show was then ineligible for last year’s Emmy Awards because the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes delayed the production of Season 3, and its release was pushed back. It seems that every year there’s a different prestige series that gets to be the belle of the ball, and Emmy voters must feel that The White Lotus is overdue for its turn.

But what does it say that the show’s most convoluted, phoned-in season is also one of this year’s most nominated? All that does is encourage Mike White to lean into his worst tendencies, and it sends a message to actors everywhere that all they need to do to win an Emmy is book a role on The White Lotus and show up.

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Bonnie Stiernberg

Bonnie Stiernberg is InsideHook’s Managing Editor. She was Music Editor at Paste Magazine for seven years, and she has written about music and pop culture for Rolling Stone, Glamour, Billboard, Vice and more.