Will Category Hogging Be a Thing of the Past at This Year’s Emmys?

thewrap.com:

a sorry peak last year when “Succession” got a record 14 acting noms while “The White Lotus” and “Dopesick” grabbed an astonishing 13 of the 14 nominations in the limited series supporting actor and actress categories.(Poor Sebastian Stan from “Pam & Tommy” was left as the sole representative of the other 107 programs that were eligible in the categories, 106 of which were shut out completely.)For years, I’d been blaming the increasing lack of variety on voters being lazy in not looking beyond a handful of favorite shows — but last year, it became clear that the problem might well have been that the Academy rules were making them look lazier than they might really be.

Those rules asked voters to peruse ballots with hundreds of contenders and then gave them this instruction: “Vote for all entries in this category that you … feel are worthy of a nomination.” (Boldface mine.)In other words, voters could – and, apparently, did – vote for everybody from “Succession,” everybody from “The White Lotus,” everybody from “Dopesick,” everybody from all their favorite shows without thinking twice.

That rule, I wrote at the time, “is guaranteed to overload the slate of nominees with contenders from the shows that everybody has seen.”But now, after six years of increasing concentration among fewer shows in the acting categories, that rule is gone.

Now, if you’re voting in a category that will have five nominees, you can only vote for five contenders; if it’s going to have eight, you can vote for eight.The hope, no doubt, is voters with a limited number of spots to fill on their ballots will become more thoughtful about who they choose to fill those spots.