'Fallout' and Emmy's Nerd Prom Potential (Part 2)
BLUE STEEL Ella Purnell grounds Fallout’s gonzo elements with her performance as Lucy MacLean.
JoJo Whilden/Prime Video
A version of this story first appeared on The Ankler.
Visual effects and makeup categories aside, Emmys are not really won by 10-foot, uh, anatomy, or Fallout’s mutated monsters, or the fungus-inspired zombies of The Last of Us. To get into that best drama series category, you’ve got to have characters and performances that resonate.
Goggins is the likeliest contender for Fallout, a scene-stealer with just one previous Emmy nomination for Justified, which makes him officially underappreciated. Like The Gilded Age contender Carrie Coon, he’s been squeezing in FYC appearances while filming the next season of The White Lotus in Thailand. But the sheer fact that he’s currently on the set of The White Lotus should tell you that his star — even at 52 — is still rising.
I’d also love to see some momentum for Ella Purnell, a breakout in the first season of Yellowjackets who brings pep but also steel to the wide-eyed Lucy, raised in a protected fallout shelter while the rest of the world went to hell. She does so much to anchor the show’s swings toward bonkers, the kind of role that’s led to Emmy nominations for actresses on other genre shows, such as Lovecraft Country’s Jurnee Smollett and Westworld’s Evan Rachel Wood.
It’s also the essential role played by another contender this year: 3 Body Problem’s Jess Hong.
Netflix’s adaptation of the blockbuster Chinese sci-fi novels by Liu Cixin, 3 Body Problem is generally a more sober show than Fallout, set in what’s basically our reality until a group of distant aliens start tinkering with it. The story eventually manages to include a VR video game, a cryogenically frozen head, an alien-worshipping cult and a message that fills every single screen on earth with the threatening message YOU ARE BUGS. It all makes sense in context, I swear.
Adapting Liu’s famously detail-heavy novels, showrunners David Benioff, D.B. Weiss — yes, the Game of Thrones guys — and Alexander Woo rearranged the central characters into a group of former college classmates known as the Oxford 5. The shift makes room for some romances and old rivalries in addition to the hard science, and it’s Hong as the physicist Jin Cheng who often brings all those elements together.
A New Zealand actress working in Hollywood for the first time — between her and The Sympathizer’s Hoa Xuande, it’s quite a season for antipodean breakouts — Hong is warm and relatable even as she explains daunting scientific concepts. The show has other standout performances, including from Game of Thrones alum John Bradley and an indomitable Rosalind Chao, but a nomination for Hong would really capture what the show accomplishes at its best.
Of course, that all depends on the Television Academy going for it. There’s a version of the drama series race where the category fills up with more classic dramas like The Crown, The Gilded Age, Slow Horses and The Morning Show, with a smidge of sci-fi courtesy of the out-there finale of The Curse. There’s also a version where it embraces Fallout and 3 Body Problem as well as Disney’s big swings Ahsoka and Loki, or Apple’s futuristic Silo.
Last year’s drama lineup went to outer space with Andor as well as to the fantasy worlds of The Last of Us and House of the Dragon, so there’s clearly space to be had. But the question we’ll be asking until nominations — and probably for many Emmy seasons to come — is just how geeky is the Television Academy willing to get?
