It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Super-Cheese!
Also: The Emmys celebrate TV... about movies
Note: I usually lead with the cover story - which, as the title and image above indicate, is about Ol’ Big and Blue. But since my thoughts on Superman include spoilers for the new movie, I moved that down to the second item this week, below the Emmy Awards chatter. If you haven’t yet seen the new film, you can stop reading as soon as you reach the picture of Seth Rogen, Ike Barinholtz, and some random old dude. Then see the movie and come back here. I’ll be waiting. I’ve learned patience at my age.
The Emmy Awards are an exciting way for Hollywood to celebrate new, up-and-coming talent.
Just take a look at this year’s nominees. First-time Emmy contenders in major categories include rising stars like Colin Farrell, Chloë Sevigny, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Javier Bardem, not to mention a little-known talent named Harrison Ford.1 There were some fresh first-time acting nominees among the guest categories too, promising young unknowns like Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese.
Okay, okay.
The Emmys have long felt like the eager younger brother to the Academy Awards, playing catch-up to the Hollywood ceremony that started it all. A common impression is that the Emmys are a stepping stone to the Oscars, helping up-and-coming TV stars break through enough to become movie stars. But while there are a few examples of Emmy winners making the jump to the big screen2, it’s hardly enough to turn correlation into causation.
In recent years, in fact, the Emmys have made more of a point of nominating and rewarding actors who are already Oscar nominees or winners. As TV budgets grow and as established movie stars show increasing interest in small-screen productions (be they for limited series, like Cate Blanchett’s Disclaimer, or ongoing series, like Ford’s Shrinking), the Emmy pool of the 2020s starts to resemble the Oscar pool of the 1990s or 2000s.
To some extent, this enforces the hierarchical position that the movies have over television. Actors who make the leap from the former to the latter naturally carry with them an air of prestige, not to mention a heavy dose of familiarity. Audiences recognize them, as do Emmy voters, and a little recognition goes a long way. There’s a lot of inertia to an awards ceremony designed to award programs that recur year after year, as seen by the multiple Outstanding Comedy wins for Frasier or Modern Family. Naturally, many voters are inclined to nominate names they recognize, even (especially?) if they recognize those names from the movie theater.
It also helps that movie stars gravitate towards the kind of shows that get Emmy love. If Al Pacino announced he was starring in a TV series, would it more likely be an eight-hour miniseries on Apple TV+ or a 22-episode network drama like NCIS: Kalamazoo? If you’re a big star with a commanding presence, you go for the prestige. Especially since streaming dramas are more likely to want (and arguably need) a pedigree like yours.
So it’s no surprise that Emmy voters go for big names. It’s more of a surprise - and a pleasant one - when they go for the smaller ones. I was very happy to see Tramell Tillman, the standout star of Severance3 as the cold and creepy Seth Milchick, get his first Supporting Actor nomination. Ditto Britt Lower, who plays Helly on the series and got a Best Actress nomination, her first in any category. And it’s similarly great to see a comeback story with his fellow nominee Noah Wyle (The Pitt), who scored his first Emmy nomination since 1999.4
And overall, there’s an interesting pool here that suggests a competitive race in several categories, including the top ones. Severance’s myriad nominations give it the slight leg up in the Outstanding Drama category, but newcomer The Pitt may be more in step with older voters. Adolescence, while still a heavy favorite for the top Limited Series prize, was far outpaced in nominations by The Penguin. (Colin Farrell seems like a good shot to win the acting prize.) Hacks is the reigning champion in the Comedy race, but it faces heady competition from The Studio - a competition that will test which form of showbiz Emmy voters wish to glorify more.
My money there is on The Studio, a show which (as I indicated last week) is exactly the type of show that Hollywood loves. Its 23 nominations - the most for any freshman comedy in history, breaking the record previously set by Ted Lasso5 - run the gamut from acting to writing to directing6 to a whole slew of guest stars. In the Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series category, in fact, five of the six nominees come from The Studio, with only Jon Bernthal (The Bear) as an outlier.
Those guest nominees? The aforementioned Howard and Scorsese, along with Bryan Cranston, Anthony Mackie, and Dave Franco. The odds of a single TV show garnering 83% of nominating slots in a category - any category - is incredibly rare, but it becomes considerably easier when the nominees in question are more familiar from the big screen than the small one.
None of this, in the end, is all that surprising. The Studio is a show that celebrates the movies. And in this vein, the Emmy voters are happy to follow suit.
So, Superman. Super-SPOILERS!
I should mention up front (since this appears to be the prerequisite of any discussion of the new James Gunn film) that I am not and have never been a great fan of Zack Snyder’s iteration of Superman. It’s certainly a unique vision for the character, a clean breakaway from the Big Blue Boy Scout defined by Richard Donner and Christopher Reeve. But the attempts at gritty realism in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman missed as often as they hit, with results that left ironically little in the way of human drama.
So I was primed for James Gunn to deliver a new version of my favorite superhero, particularly as I loved his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy7 and was generally onboard with his iteration of The Suicide Squad. While I’ve grown a bit burned out by reboots, there’s no question that DC’s previous attempt at a cinematic universe was wildly uneven, and after eight or nine consecutive box-office bombs, one can’t exactly blame them for hitting the reset button.
On the upside, I’m very glad Gunn chose to forgo yet another retelling of Superman’s origin. We all know the story by now; the image of the Kents coming across baby Kal-El’s rocket is every bit as ubiquitous as that of Martha Wayne’s pearls scattering across the floor of Crime Alley, or a radiation-poisoned arachnid sinking its mandibles into Peter Parker’s hand. Moreover, superhero origins are largely played out at this point, to the extent that even obscure and unusual origin movies (Blue Beetle, Shang-Chi) just feel trite and shopworn.
So the film’s decision to toss us right in the middle of the action - though it gives the resulting two-hour adventure an episodic feel - is a good one. Similarly good is the casting, with David Corenswet a believable Man of Steel, Rachel Brosnahan a charming Lois Lane8, and Nicholas Hoult a compellingly evil Lex Luthor. (The “goofy Lex” has been a staple of cinema for a few decades too long, so it’s refreshing to see a version of the character who is simply stone-cold evil.)
The film’s main problem is its script, which is overstuffed to the point of panic, as though DC wants to cover as many bases and lay the groundwork for as many spinoffs as possible. The film’s structure means that nothing feels explicitly like setup - again, we’re being tossed right in the middle of everything and expected to simply roll with it - but it does get a little unwieldy after a while. And Gunn’s goofy sense of humor - which works better in some aspects (Krypto the Super-Dog fits right in to this world) than others (Lex Luthor’s army of literal social-media monkeys feels like the director grinding a personal axe) - can only do so much to paper over the holes.
The overburdened script leads to several characters and relationships feeling shortchanged - Lois’ part is disappointingly underwritten, particularly her relationship with Superman, and Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) is bafflingly recast as a ladies’ man with a serious nose for news (which he obtains from all the women who crush on him). Worst of all are Jonathan and Martha Kent, who receive too little development to overcome their portrayal as Duck Dynasty hicks. A concluding scene in which Superman watches home videos of his youth on the Kent farm is meant to be an emotionally resonant conclusion, but it comes off as manipulative and unearned.
The visual effects are solid and rarely resort to formless sludge (save for a couple of scenes set in a “pocket dimension”), but the fight sequences begin to blue together after a while, and Gunn’s penchant for swooping, unbroken camera shots distancing, rather than involving, us with the action onscreen. (One particularly bad example: a second-act fight scene featuring Mr. Terrific [Edi Gathegi] and his T-Spheres9, shot from a perspective which both is and isn’t that of Lois.) There are a couple of exciting beats in the climax, but it all winds up feeling a bit frenetic.
This is to say nothing of the film’s attempt to introduce political conflict in the form of the fictional nations of Boravia and Jarhanpur, a conflict that’s deliberately vague enough to not be grafted onto any specific global conflict in the real world even as thousands of Internet bots will convince people otherwise. The busy script leaves this story feeling like a disposable subplot, chiefly there to repurpose Superman as a global champion of justice, rather than simply an American one.10
Ironically, the new Superman winds up being a very pro-American movie, particularly in its celebration of the American experiment as a melting pot of immigration. The reveal that Krypton is a planet of “Great Replacement” supremacists doesn’t get much talk here, but that’s the point: Clark Kent - being raised on American soil, with prototypically American values - rejects this message of his biological parents out of hand. It’s a surprisingly anti-woke message for a film that’s been blasted as woke by many of its detractors, proving (yet again) that the Internet is too hasty to retweet first and ask questions later.
Anyway, this is all a long way of saying that James Gunn’s Superman is… okay! It’s deeply cheesy and profoundly ridiculous, but these characteristics have defined Superman as a character for much of his 87-year history. As far as kickstarting new cinematic universes go, this one shows promise, even if audiences hit Peak Superhero around 2019 and will likely never attain that high again. We’ll see if DC can stay the course11, but for the moment, you do believe this Superman can fly.
Let’s also not forget this year’s short-form drama category, which includes first-time Emmy nominee JK Simmons.
Bruce Willis, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Melissa McCarthy are the first three that come to mind. (George Clooney, believe it or not, never won an Emmy for ER.)
Severance as a whole ran up the score with 27 nominations, the most of any series this year.
Wyle was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for each of the first five seasons of ER, going home empty-handed each time. Still, the worst shutout for the star of a medical drama has to be Hugh Laurie, nominated six times for House and winning none of them.
Has any network or streaming service become so competitive for Emmys as quickly as Apple TV+? Even HBO was around for a good couple of decades before it became an awards-season behemoth.
For “The Oner,” a standout episode that will likely rank among the best of 2025.
The first two-thirds of it, anyway. Though GotG3 has a pretty awesome hallway fight.
Been a fan of Brosnahan since her days on Manhattan and (of course) The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, so it’s cool to see her break out like this.
I was genuinely shocked that not a single character in this James Gunn-scripted movie referred to Mr. Terrific’s T-Spheres as his “balls.” Lois calls them “circles” at one point and that’s about it.
DC has been distancing itself from the international box-office poison of “the American way” since Perry White referred to “truth, justice, all that stuff” in Superman Returns.
It cannot be stressed just how many lucky breaks Marvel caught in their attempt to build a whole cinematic universe from scratch in the late 2000s and early 2010s. A lot could have gone wrong (and arguably has in recent years, with the MCU now floundering about for a new direction).