“Wait, Mrs. Doubtfire won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical? I’m not sure if that lessens our opinion of the Globes, or improves it…”

~AFFotD’s In-House Film Critic

When honoring television series, there are only two award shows we trust—The Golden Globes and the Primetime Emmys. The Globes, of course, award television and film, and are ruled by the whims of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a secretive group of people with some questionable credentials and qualifications, while the Emmys celebrate all aspects of television production, not just best shows and actors, and are awarded by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, a group of producers, writers, and actors dedicated to the advancement of the television industry.

Both awards are broadcast on national television in a national event filled all sorts of well-respected and regarded celebrities and also Mel Gibson sometimes is there. But outside of their categorical differences (the Globes have movie stars! The Emmys have a prize that’s just “Outstanding Production Design For a Narrative Period of Fantasy Program [One Hour or More]!”) these two organizations also differ in one major way.

Taste.

While the Golden Globes are notorious for nominating, and even awarding, shows that never even catch a whiff of an Emmy nomination (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, for example, won Best Comedy and Best Leading Actor in 2014, two categories it has never even been nominated for in the Emmys), there are a whole slew of well-regarded shows that, apparently, the Golden Globes think are butt.

There could be a lot of reasons for this! It could be that the Foreign Press prefers to award less “popular” shows than the Emmys do. It could be that they are inclined to lean more towards non-American-created content.

Or it might be that the Emmys are run by a group of people who work solely in television, and the Globes are run by like 90 people who do things like write fake interviews with Drew Barrymore for inflight magazines. We could do a deep dive, dig up research, and examine social trends, and get to the real meat of why this happens.

Or we could just randomly pick like, oh, what’s a good number…eight? Yeah, if we were really lazy, we could just pick eight shows the Globes hate, and laugh about it. But this is a respectable publication, so we would never do that to you, right?

8 TV Shows That the Emmys LOVE (and the Golden Globes HATE)

Now, we’re not saying that the Emmys know what shows are good and popular, while the Golden Globes willfully ignore those shows to pamper lesser deserving shows. Not at all—there have been numerous Golden Globe winners who, frankly, deserve more love from the Emmys. Hell, the person who wrote this song won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy, and the Emmys are cowards for not following suit. But it still seems a bit strange how large of a discrepancy we’re seeing with the following shows.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

0 Emmys (!?) on 18 Nominations (and 0 Golden Globe Nominations)

So let’s get something straight before we dive into this. Every show is going to show a huge discrepancy between Emmy nominations and Golden Globe nominations. That’s because there are a lot (lot) (LOT) of Emmy categories! The Golden Globes only give out prizes for Best Comedy, Best Drama, Best Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television, Best Actor and Actress for each of those categories, with a single Best Supporting Actor and Actress award that combines all three categories into a single prize. That’s a total of 10 television categories.

In 2018, there were 124 Emmys awards handed out. And one of them, Outstanding Individual in Animation, had six winners. There were only six nominees in the category! So yes, it’s super easy to get an Emmy nomination, apparently. Which means that Kimmy Schmidt’s 18 nominations aren’t exactly breaking any records. That said, it has been nominated for Best Comedy Series and Best Lead Actress (twice), which makes the Golden Globes flat out refusal to nominate it for anything over the course of the last three seasons a little strange. Maybe the Golden Globes just don’t like it because something something Netflix?

But as you’ll see, the Emmys and the Globes have very different ideas of how American comedy should look, since the Globes clearly also dislike…

Silicon Valley

2 Emmys on 35 Nominations (and 0 Golden Globes on 2 Nominations)

The mere fact that Silicon Valley, one of the consistently funniest shows on TV, has only won Emmys for Production Design and Editing throughout its existence shows that the concept of award shows in general is flawed and this article is ultimately a pointless lesson in futility. That said, holy shit do the Globes not like this show! Like, they nominated it for Best Television Series – Comedy or Musical in 2015 and 2016, but that’s fucking it.

Meanwhile, it’s gotten the Emmy nomination in that category for each season it’s been on the air. That includes 2018, where Silicon Valleywas nominated for Outstanding Comedy, Outstanding Directing, Outstanding Writing, and Outstanding Casting, and it was shut out by the Golden Globes who decided to nominate Will & Fucking Grace instead. What’s wrong with this picture?

Curb Your Enthusiasm

2 Emmys on 43 Nominations  (and 1 Golden Globe on 5 Nominations)

This entry has less to do with how many Emmys versus Golden Globes the show has received, and more with how many seasons of the show have actually gotten nominations from the Emmys, versus the Globes. While they’ve not done well at the Emmys in terms of stacking statues, they’ve at least gotten Best Comedy nominations for 8 of their 9 seasons, including a nomination last year.

The Golden Globes, on the other hand, only nominated it for three seasons, and not since 2006. That’s pretty surprising for a show that IMDB users list as the 69^th (nice) best show of all time. Entourage has nearly three times as many Globe nominations as Curb Your Enthusiasm, and even if you’re not a particular fan of Larry David’s work, you have to admit that it takes a certain kind of…personality to try to convince yourself that Entourage is more award-worthy than Curb.

Black Mirror

6 Emmys on 11 Nominations (and 0 Golden Globe Nominations)

Black Mirror aired two seasons on the BBC before getting picked up by Netflix and suddenly becoming a show that A—cast a lot more Americans and B—became a show that Americans actually had heard of, thus devastating dozens of Anglophile hipsters who were more than happy to start conversations about “this super dark like, dystopia show, I have to watch it through a VPN, no big deal” (*cough* our editor-in-chief *cough*).

But in the short time that it’s been widely viewable in the US, it’s gone bananas. It’s won over half of the awards it’s been nominated for, while getting…absolutely no love from the Foreign Press. What’s the deal, Foreign Press?

This show is made by a foreign dude! Where’s your loyalty? The Globes literally have a category for anthology programming like Black Mirror that’s specifically designed to be easier to win, against fewer competitors. For this show to not once be nominated is wild. We’re sure The Alienist was fine and dandy, but there’s no way more people liked that limited series better than, like, USS Callister.

Sherlock

9 Emmys on 39 Nominations (and 0 Golden Globes on 1 Nomination)

Here’s another British show that has killed it in the Limited Series circuit that, somehow, has earned the ire of the Foreign Press. Benedict Cumberbatch (or as we call him in the office “Benedict Cumr…Cumle…Chumber…Doctor Strange) was nominated in 2013, where he lost to Kevin Costner in Hatfields and McCoys. Remember Hatfields and McCoys?

It was on every billboard for like three months and then was promptly forgotten by larger pop culture? Yeah, that beat out Sherlock in the only category it’s ever gotten.

The Globes entirely ignored the show’s third season, which won Emmys for both Dr. Strange and Young Bilbo Baggins, with several more in writing and production categories, so there’s a pretty clear discrepancy at play here.

Veep

17 Emmys on 59 Nominations (and 0 Golden Globes [!?] on 7 Nominations)

How on Earth has Veep, one of the most decorated shows of all time (did you know they have more Emmys than Mad Men?), have a total of zero Golden Globes to their name. We were about to make a joke along the lines of “Hell, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has won an Emmy more times than the Globes have even nominated the show, har har” but then we looked it up and saw Louis-Dreyfus has actually won the Emmy for Leading Actress in a Comedy six fucking times, so we’re one final season away from that being the truth. The show has only been nominated for best comedy once, in 2017, and we’ll give you a guess where the other six nominations came from.

Here’s a running list of actresses who have won Golden Globes on years that Julia Louis-Dreyfus has easily waltzed home with an Emmy. Lena Dunham, Amy Poehler (we’re fine with that one), Gina Rodriguez (0 Emmy nominations), Rachel Bloom (0 Emmy nominations, but again, one great song about dicks), and Tracee Ellis Ross.

Now, most, if not all, of those actresses are very funny and on well-regarded shows, but it’s still wild that she’s gone 0 for 6 on one award program, and 6 for 6 on another. Though we will give the Globes credit for one thing—they like to be democratic.

You almost never see the same actor win the top award more than once. We kind of like that! Spread the love around. Though apparently there’s no spreadable love for poor Julia. We suppose she’ll manage somehow.

Breaking Bad

16 Emmys on 58 Nominations (and 2 Golden Globes on 7 Nominations)

Now, about 50% of the people who watched and loved Breaking Bad got into it pretty late into the game. We get that. But when your job is to award the best television shows, it’s pretty telling that while Bad debuted in 2008, Bryan Cranston didn’t get his first Golden Globe nomination until 2011. He had won three Emmys by that point already!

They didn’t even nominate it until the penultimate season, and when they tossed the Best Drama and Best Actor in a Drama award its way after the show ended with arguably the best final season of all time, it almost felt like they did it because they were forced to.

But as insane as the Foreign Press’ refusal to acknowledge Breaking Bad, arguably one of the top five shows or all time (we see you writing your comment on what five shows you think are better and we don’t care), this love/hate dynamic gets truly bonkers when we look at the most popular shows to ever air on a premium network.

Game of Thrones

47  Emmys on 128 Nominations (and 1 Golden Globe on 7 Nominations)

At this point we have to assure you that we’re not making up these numbers, because 47 wins versus one is fucking unbelievable (and the one win wasn’t even for Best Drama! Peter Dinklage won the first and only Globe that GoT has ever received. Strangly, he’s also only been nominated once).

(Another fun fact—Dinklage has not yet won an Emmy, though he has been nominated seven times. We call that a Julia Louis-Dreyfus Golden Globe situation.)

We can’t get over those numbers. It’s at least been nominated five times for Best Drama, but considering we’re on Season 8 and every single season has been a pretty huge cultural event, there has to be something at play here. We just can’t figure out what. Maybe someone in the Foreign Press really liked Ned Stark and couldn’t forgive the show after season one? Or everyone in the Association really digs the books, and they’re the kind of A Song of Ice and Fire fans who always are like, “Well, no, no, actually what happens to Catelyn Stark in the books is…” but something is up here.

Or maybe, just maybe…awards are kind of silly and arbitrary anyway, and it makes all the sense in the world that two different voting bodies would vote for different kind of shows. Naw, that can’t be it. It’s definitely the vendetta thing.