Amazon Studios’ 2023 Emmy performance is probably best encapsulated by the Outstanding Comedy Series category. There is the veteran, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which years ago landed Prime Video’s first Best Series Emmy win. It is ending its five-season run in style with 14 nominations, including Outstanding Comedy Series.
There is the upstart, surprise Outstanding Comedy Series nominee Jury Duty which put Amazon’s up-and-coming AVOD platform Freevee on the awards map with four total noms, breaking new ground for ad-supported streamers.
And then there is Netflix’s Outstanding Comedy Series nominee Wednesday, produced by MGM, which has been fully integrated into Amazon Studios following the venerable Hollywood studios’ acquisition by Amazon.
The combined Amazon MGM Studios scored 68 Primetime Emmy nominations today, including nine for Daisy Jones & The Six, six (all in crafts categories) for the The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) and three for Swarm.
James Marsden (L) and Ronald Gladden
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“We are so proud of the Freevee team and the Jury Duty team. It’s such a bold idea, and it could have gone wrong in so many ways,” Amazon Studios’ Head of Television Vernon Sanders said. “This has been a word-of-mouth show. It just blew up over TikTok and to this day, people are finding the show and loving it.”
Speaking of the team at Freevee, whose business model is largely built on programming at a modest cost, “they’ve just done a miraculous job with tight budgets, making things that resonate,” Sanders said. “The quality of the content from Freevee really stands out.”
Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke praised Head of AVOD Programming Lauren Anderson, whom both Salke and Sanders had mentored at NBC, and her talent relationships.
“We operate as one big creative organization so it’s just been really gratifying to see these things break out, and especially Jury Duty because it’s a reinvention, it’s a long overdue comedy that surprises and entertains in a different way,” Salke said. “That projects been around for a while, so finding the stars aligning and having to come together in this incarnation, with James [Marsden] and with Ronald [Gladden] and the great team behind Freevee creatively, it’s been such a great thing to see.”
Amazon’s 2023 Emmy nominees have something in common, Sanders said.
“What’s been gratifying, all the shows that are getting recognized, there were huge risk taken with them,” he said. “Swarm is really unusual and provocative; when Jen and I heard that pitch, we immediately jumped in and said, Yes, let’s do it because it just felt so relevant and dangerous and specific. And I would say the same thing from that first conversation on Daisy, the audacity to put together a group of actors trying to create a true band.”
While Salke is happy with the showing in the Lead Actress In a Limited or Anthology Series field, which features two Prime Video stars, Swarm‘s Dominique Fishback and Daisy Jones & The Six‘s Riley Keough, she said she was hoping two other contenders in the category, The English‘ star’s Emily Blunt and Dead Ringers‘ Rachel Weisz, would also be recognized.
MGM TV’s Wednesday earned 12 Emmy nominations for its first season.
“Even though that’s a Netflix show, we take great pride and are huge fans of Wednesday,” Sanders said. “This is a group of studio executives working together across MGM and Amazon so there’s great pride and ownership in those shows.”
That includes unscripted MGM hits The Voice and Vanderpump Rules, both logging multiple Emmy nominations today.
This is a transitional year for Prime Video with its longtime awards juggernaut The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel coming to an end.
“We couldn’t be more proud of Meisel and to have it end on this kind of high note; I can’t think of a better way to have entered it creatively,” Salke said.
As for what would fill the void left by Maisel‘s departure, “we have a lot of great development projects in the works,” Salke said.
That includes Étoile, the next series from the Maisel duo of Amy Sherman-Palladino & Daniel Palladino, the upcoming Mr. and Mrs. Smith from Swarm co-creator/executive producer Donald Glover as well as series starring Scarlett Johansson (Just Cause), Reese Witherspoon (All Stars) and Nicole Kidman (Kay Scarpetta).
And, while both Daisy Jones & the Six and Swarm were conceived as limited series, there are discussions with their creative teams about potentially expanding the franchises with new installments.
The Emmy nominations come on Day 72 of the WGA strike, which has delayed a number of series, including Étoile, and on the eve of a potential SAG-AFTRA strike.
“It’s an unfortunate situation that we all find ourselves in,” Salke said. She would not elaborate on Amazon’s strategy but noted that the company had anticipated the possible impact from the work stoppage, “so there’s been a lot of organizing and planning around different contingencies that we may find ourselves having to deal with.”
Next up for Prime Video are the launches of Fallout, from Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, and Harlan Coben’s Shelter, which Salke and Sanders are high on. They also touted the upcoming second season of Reacher
“And Alex Cross, remember you heard it here first, it’s going to be big,” Sanders said.
