It’s been hard not to feel bad for Jon Hamm. With Matthew Weiner, Hamm created one of the great TV characters of the past 10 years — on a critically acclaimed and highly decorated show that will always be name-checked when people discuss the current Golden Age of TV — and yet, somehow, he had managed to get shut out at the Emmys heading into the 2015 ceremony. Every year he’d get nominated, and every year he’d get hyped as one of the favorites, and then every year someone else would walk up to the stage to collect the trophy. Hamm always had a good sense of humor about it, which made it feel a little more tolerable, cosmically, but the concept of him going unrewarded for playing Don Draper still just didn’t feel right. Of course Jon Hamm should have an Emmy. It needed to happen just to balance out the universe and prevent all the planets from hurtling into the sun.
But here’s the funny thing about Hamm’s 0-fer leading up to this year: It was more of a macro injustice than a series of micro ones. If you get your brain cranking a bit and try put yourself back in the moment they happened, each of his seven previous losses can be kind of justified. The majority of them — four, including the first three in a row — were the result of being on television at the same time as Bryan Cranston, who was busy turning in one of the all-time great performances on another all-time great show. (On the same network, which had to be weird.) In hindsight, it seems reasonable to think maybe Hamm could have stolen one of those some year, but I mean… are you gonna take away one of Walter White’s Emmys?
Even in the years between Cranston’s opening three-peat and his bookend win last year for the final season of Breaking Bad, it’s possible to wrap your head around why someone other than Hamm won. Kyle Chandler won for the last season of Friday Night Lights in 2010, another legacy-type win and a tip of the cap to a great network drama in an era of network dominance. (This was also the year Timothy Olyphant received his only nomination for the entire run of Justified, which is another column about a different injustice for another day.) Damian Lewis won for the first season of Homeland the next year. He was a fresh face on a new drama that dealt with The Issues Of Our Time, and a break from the Hamm/Cranston/Buscemi/Hall usual nomination suspects. And two years ago, the award went to Jeff Daniels for The Newsroom, which you can probably chalk up to Aaron Sorkin’s return to television after The West Wing as much as the actual performance.
And it’s not like Hamm never got to take the stage during that run. Mad Men won for Outstanding Drama each of its first four seasons. The whole cast got to stand up there in a triumphant moment at the end of the ceremony so many times that it sort of felt like they all had statues, despite the fact that the show never won for an individual acting performance. Not Hamm, not Elisabeth Moss, not even John Slattery for Roger Sterling, which seems impossible now that I’m typing it out. By the end, it started to feel like a trade-off, almost like the voters got together in a room and decided, “Okay, we’ll give other people the performance Emmys, but give Mad Men the biggie. Bingo bango, problem solved.”
With all of that context, Hamm’s win for Outstanding Actor in his last shot as a member of the Mad Men cast almost felt cathartic, as much a reason to sigh with relief as it was to celebrate. He had to win. He had to win. Like, all due respect to Liev Schreiber, but can you even imagine the outcry if he had won for Ray Donovan last night? There would have been chaos. Blood in the streets. My street, at least. Added to the blood there already is after the committee went ahead and completed the shutout on Amy Poehler and her remarkable comedic performance on an NBC series produced by Michael Schur and Greg Daniels, a maneuver known in industry circles as “the full Carell.”
But luckily, at least one disaster was averted and a great wrong was finally righted. Jon Hamm has an Emmy, people. It’s about damn time.
