The big glamour awards at the 2016 Emmys — your Best Actors, your Best Actresses, your Best Dramas and Comedies and whatever category Orange Is the New Black is in this year — don’t get handed out until the primetime festivities on Sunday, but a bunch of trophies were distributed this weekend during the Creative Arts ceremony, and something very important happened, and I think it’s worth making a big deal over: Amy Poehler finally won an Emmy.
It’s crazy that Amy Poehler didn’t have an Emmy until this weekend. Amy Poehler should have lots of Emmys by now. At least, like, two. It feels like Amy Poehler should have two Emmys, right? “Two-time Emmy Award winner Amy Poehler” we would call her, justifiably, even if some of us would still be upset that she didn’t have three. Actually, wait. This is my hypothetical. I can just give her a third Emmy. “Three-time Emmy Award winner Amy Poehler.” Yeah. That’s definitely better.
The thing is, as crazy as “Amy Poehler just won her first Emmy in 2016” is as a cumulative situation, if you go through her nominations year by year, you can see how it happened.
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, 2009: Winner – Kristen Chenoweth (Pushing Daisies). Her first nomination was for SNL, but Kristen Wiig was also nominated, which probably split some votes. Combine that with the fact that Chenoweth was a big deal Broadway star and TV was still in its pre-Peak, little-brother, hey-hey-look-at-us place in the entertainment world, and fine. (Also, Pushing Daisies was good.)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, 2010: Winner – Edie Falco (Nurse Jackie). Her first nomination for Parks and Recreation was doomed because a) the first season of Parks wasn’t its strongest, and b) this was Falco’s first TV role after The Sopranos and they probably would have given her the Emmy even if the whole show was a half-hour Sonic commercial where she sat in the backseat and rolled her eyes while the two guys in the front argued about tater tots.
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, 2011: Winner – Melissa McCarthy (Mike & Molly). NOTE: This year the award was renamed “Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series Who Also Just Had A Star-Making Role in Bridesmaids,” making Poehler ineligible. Shame, but rules are rules.
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, 2012: Winner – Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep). Veep is incredible and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a comedy legend and national treasure. Asking me or anyone to choose between her and Amy Poehler is psychological warfare and would be banned by any self-respecting democratic nation.
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, 2013: Winner – Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep). Also, Veep is about national politics, which is like catnip to awards voters because it feels ***important***, even though Veep is secretly less about politics than it is about people shouting creative profanity at each other in 30-minute chunks. But again, fine.
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, 2014: Winner – Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep). Okay, now this is getting to be a bit much.
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, 2015: Winner – Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep). For the love of God, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, let Amy Poehler live.
See what I mean, though? None of those are really a snub, in the way you’d typically think about the term. Even when the result seems a bit screwy in hindsight, you can understand it a bit once context is added. And it would be cool if the Emmys released the vote totals so we could see how close she came to dethroning JLD in 2015, after Parks ended its run. But in any event, you add up all these little tiny, mostly defensible decisions, and next thing you know you’ve managed to ignore someone who led one of the best comedies of the past decade and was also responsible for this.
Tears. Even today. Even when I knew it was coming.
(Two additional things worth noting here: One, Steve Carell never won an Emmy for The Office either, which almost makes me think Mike Schur got caught egging a voter’s house as a teen one night and they’ve been holding it against shows he produces ever since. And two, Amy Poehler was famously very chill about it all, throwing an Emmy losers’ charity event with fellow multiple-loser — and eventual winner — Jon Hamm.)
Now, this is where I should stop to state the obvious: Award shows are stupid and bad and don’t really matter. The whole process is a flawed political mess that often results in unjust results because voters try to catch a trendy wave in the moment or just rubber stamp a familiar name in year after year. (Some year after Veep ends, we should nominate Julia Louis-Dreyfus for a show that doesn’t exist, just as an experiment. My vote for the title of the fake show is Brooklyn Vineyard.) Amy Poehler is no better an actress or comedian than she was before this weekend, and it’s a little silly in the grand scheme of things that when we finally did give her an Emmy, we gave it to her for a guest appearance and made her share it with nine-time winner Tina Fey.
But if we’re all going to do this and make a big deal about handing out gold statues to honor artistic performances, and there’s no way we can be talked out of it, then I feel much better today knowing that Amy Poehler has an Emmy.