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"After much hubbub over the potential for Netflix to further shake up the television landscape with Emmy nods for its original programming, the dust has settled and House of Cards has prevailed. The series picked up nine nominations in big-ticket categories such as outstanding drama series, lead actor in a drama series for Kevin Spacey and lead actress for Robin Wright. Already, the headlines have proclaimed the onset of a new cultural era. \u201CUpstart Roils Nerves in a Packed TV Race,\u201D announced Bill Carter\u2019s headline in yesterday\u2019s Times. \"House of Cards Makes History,\u201D said CBS News this morning.\nBut despite all the commotion over the new platform, House of Cards looks resolutely conventional alongside the other nominees \u2014 similarly glossy, epic tales with complicated antiheroes and dense plots: Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, Homeland. After the nominations were announced this morning, Netflix\u2019s chief content officer Ted Sarandos told Brian Stelter: \u201CIn a way, it solidifies that television is television, no matter what pipe brings it to the screen.\u201D Sure, television is television, but the divide between the drama and the comedy categories has become the Emmys\u2019 biggest glitch.\nThe debate about the creative freedom afforded by cable vs. the limitations imposed by network TV has raged for years around the drama category. When the Emmys first began including cable shows in 1988, and cable began its ascent to Emmy dominance with The Sopranos at the helm, executives for network dramas complained that they were at a disadvantage. Bill Carter points out in his Times story that one executive for NYPD Blue argued in the early \u201990s that he dealt with limitations far more oppressive than what the The Sopranos ever had to face. \nBut now network drama has clearly lapsed from the Emmy radar; a network show hasn\u2019t won best drama since 24 in 2006. In the comedy division, meanwhile, which Modern Family has dominated in recent years, network and cable shows still jostle for recognition. Even with Netflix in the mix, the drama category actually affords a relatively level playing field: the elaborately produced House of Cards looks no different from an HBO or AMC series, and Netflix similarly imposes very few creative strictures. So comedy, not drama, is the category where we see the tension between creative freedom and limitations play out most concretely.\nIn this year\u2019s \u201Cbest comedy\u201D bracket, the inclusion of Louie is perhaps the biggest surprise. Shows like Louie and Girls sit uneasily alongside the flashier, jokier Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, 30 Rock, and Veep. The comedy category has long been frustratingly miscellaneous. Edie Falco was nominated four times in a row \u2014 and won once \u2014 for Nurse Jackie, a raw and intense dramatic performance. \nShows like Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty and Ally McBeal have picked up Emmy nominations, but their hour-long dramedy structure is a totally different species than the half-hour network sitcom. Curb Your Enthusiasm has been nominated for 38 Emmys and won only one, for best direction of a single episode, in a field that also included Sex and the City and Will and Grace. It is hard to overstate how unequal all these shows are, and how fruitless it feels to compare them. Laura Dern\u2019s nomination as best actress in a comedy series for Enlightened was a pleasant surprise. But Dern\u2019s Amy looks particularly sharp-edged and unfunny against golden retrievers like Leslie Knope and Liz Lemon.\nDespite an Emmy campaign from Netflix that included planting promotional posters in lawns, Arrested Development didn\u2019t get a nod for best comedy. (It did get nominations for Jason Bateman as lead actor in a comedy series, along with music composition and single-camera picture editing.) But its absence from the category is a good thing. How to judge its strange, knotty humor alongside the bubblegum yuks of Big Bang Theory and the dire cringe-comedy of Girls? At least if House of Cards beats Mad Men, it'll feel like a fair match.  \n\nImage: Phil Shirley/Flickr"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/07/18/problem-with-emmy-noms/>