The Primetime Emmy ceremony typically seems long, but it includes just a fraction of the awards that the Television Academy distributes each year. On Jan. 6 and 7, the academy hosted the Creative Arts Emmys to allocate the bulk of them. (The name is somewhat misleading. Shouldn’t all television be creative?) This separate two-night ceremony honors designers, craftspeople, guest actors and also animation, game shows, reality and documentary television.
HBO and Max took 22 Creative Arts Emmys and Netflix 16, trailed by FX, Apple TV+ and Disney+. The weekend’s biggest winners were two freshmen series: HBO’s fungus-among-us drama “The Last of Us,” which took home eight Emmys, and the FX soccer docuseries “Welcome to Wrexham,” which won five of the six Emmys it was nominated for, including outstanding unstructured reality program. (All this and promotion, too!) The award for outstanding structured reality program went to “Queer Eye.” “The Bear,” “Wednesday” and “The White Lotus” also received multiple awards.
Other prizes included former President Barack Obama’s second Emmy, this one for narrating Netflix’s “Working: What We Do All Day.” (His previous Emmy is for narrating the Netflix series “Our Great National Parks.”) Tim Robinson won for outstanding actor in a short form series for “I Think You Should Leave,” which picked up another Emmy for outstanding short form comedy, drama or variety series. Sam Richardson, Robinson’s onetime co-star in the Comedy Central sitcom “Detroiters,” also picked up an Emmy, his first, for outstanding guest actor in a comedy for “Ted Lasso.”
While most of the awards presented to “The Last of Us” were in design categories (it was a shoo-in for prosthetics design), it also picked up two guest acting awards, for Storm Reid as Riley, and Nick Offerman as Bill. Offerman beat out three of his co-stars, including Murray Bartlett, who played his onscreen lover. In an Instagram post the day after he won, Offerman referred to Bartlett as “my magnificently generous partner and rightly lauded Aussie top man.”