The Hollywood Reporter’s roundtable with the actresses who are likely candidate for lead acting Emmys has a lot of fascinating insights into it, including that Breaking Bad Anna Gunn would like to have been on The Wire, which has made me picture her as Rhonda Pearlman’s best friend. But I was particularly struck by Kerry Washington’s part of a conversation about how the women in question handle looks and casting, prompted in part by a story Parenthood‘s Monica Potter told about not getting cast for something because she hadn’t lost the weight she gained during pregnancy yet:

[Connie] Britton: I agree. I’ve never had somebody say to me that I needed to look a certain way for a role, but I’ve always lived in dread of what that would be like. It’s our responsibility to play these full-fledged women, and to play women who look like people we actually see in life. It’s more interesting, and I think audiences appreciate it, too.

Washington: It’s a little bit different for me because I’ll audition for something and they’ll just decide that they’re not going “ethnic” with a character, which I hear a lot.

THR: Casting directors still use the word “ethnic”?

Washington: If not “black,” then yeah. People have artistic license … that’s what casting is: fitting the right look to the right character. Whereas you could maybe lose some weight, there’s not really anything I can do, nor would I want to, about being black.

I would be totally fascinated to hear said casting directors’ explanations to Washington, if she’s ever asked, for why a character can’t be a person of color, or why it would be the wrong decision for the show for that character to be not white—or for that matter, Irish or Jewish, identities that are ethnic within the broad racial category of whiteness. Actual color-blindness in casting would require directors and showrunners to have to meet as a high a standard to explain why a character should be white as for any other race or ethnicity. But as long as whiteness isn’t broadly as anything other than an invisible, neutral state of affairs that all non-white people deviate from and disrupt in some way, we’re likely to get Hollywood’s version of colorblindness, where non-white people can be on-screen sometimes, as long as their non-whiteness is decor, rather than substance that might risk making some people uncomfortable.

It’s the top-ten list time of year, and as I’m catching up on some shows and sifting through my list of favorites, I’ve been struck by how many fantastic performances we’ve seen in television this year. While some are obvious continuations of dominant streaks, like Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s turns on Breaking Bad, or Tina Fey’s embrace of happiness on 30 Rock, there are some truly astonishing turns going down on shows that almost no one is watching, or in shows that are so crowded with flashy performances that these are in danger of being overlooked. Here are five of the actors whose work hit me hardest this year:

1. Khandi Alexander, Treme: I ran a little behind Treme this season, but catching up on it this week, I regretted that. Much of that regret comes from how marvelous Alexander is as LaDonna Batiste-Williams. As a bar owner trying to keep her place alive, and determined to see through the prosecution of the men who robbed and sexually assaulted her, Alexander is by turns moody and joyful. Whether she’s feuding with her husband’s wealthy family, cooly cussing out a man demanding protection money from her, finally taking the stand in her much-delayed trial, or developing a tender friendship with Albert Lambreaux, Alexander’s been given the chance to be as complete a female character as I’ve seen on television in a long time. “Burnt me out for nothing,” she said in the season finale when her case ended in a heartbreaking mistrial. But it’s not nothing to those of us who have been watching at home.

2. Andra Fuller, The L.A. Complex: It is a source of considerable sadness to me that so few people found it in themselves to watch The L.A. Complex, an incredibly sharp ensemble show about what it actually takes to become successful in the entertainment industry. The cast is strong up and down the lineup, but if there was justice in the business, this should have been a breakout performance for Andra Fuller as closeted rapper Kaldrick King. King is one of the most sexual and emotional gay characters ever to appear on network television, and as he battered a young lover, made amends with him and reconnected with his father, and began a relationship with a handsome young lawyer who gave him the courage to come out, Fuller acted the hell out of every scene.

3. Eliza Coupe, Happy Endings: I spoke to Eliza Coupe earlier this season about her approach to physical comedy, playing uptight, and being half of one of only a few interracial couples on television. Since then, her performance as Jane Kerkovich-Williams has only gotten deeper and funnier. Whether she’s going overboard in enjoying being the breadwinner in her family, sneaking a perfectly-prepared turkey into her sister’s house to ensure that Thanksgiving isn’t a disaster, or revisiting the origin of her relationship with her husband Brad, Jane’s exploded the idea that being controlling means you have to be a humorless bitch, and I love her for it.

4. Charles Dance and Maisie Williams, Game of Thrones: Peter Dinklage probably has Game of Thrones‘ acting awards slot locked up as long as Tyrion Lannister lives. But that’s too bad, because Dance and Williams spent this year putting on the best cross-generational acting clinic on television as Tywin Lannister and Arya Stark. They’re people who should be mortal enemies, but, isolated from their families and in service to larger causes, find themselves understanding each other. I could watch the two of them dance around each other in Harrenhal’s great hall for ten hours a year.

5. Walton Goggins, Justified: Goggins, who’s been everywhere from Sons of Anarchy to Lincoln this year, probably has the best shot of anyone on this list of scoring an actual Emmy nomination. As Boyd Crowder, Goggins has taken an archetype, a racist redneck, and infused the role with an injection of coal-country rage, tenderness towards his surrogate father Arlo Givens, and a spiky relationship with Arlo’s son Raylan, who is his sometime-enemy, sometime-ally. I can’t wait to see where their rivalry heads next. Goggins was good on The Shield, but I think he’s even better on Justified.

Homeland‘s complete domination of the drama Emmy Awards last night—Claire Danes and Damian Lewis won for their lead performances, and the show took home awards for writing for a drama series and for best drama series—was a surprise for many of us watching at home, whether we doing so for personal or professional reasons (or in my case, watching football while following along on Twitter). It’s possible to quibble with some of the awards. Breaking Bad, in particular, had an extremely strong season, and I might have gone with Bryan Cranston over Lewis just for the sheer range he was required to deploy. But on the whole, I’m very happy with the drama awards (vastly less so with comedy, but that’s another story). And there’s something exciting to me about watching the enthusiasm for Homeland on display last night.

On Twitter, a number of critics I care for dearly and admire were quick to declare Mad Men a vastly superior show to Homeland, which in the final analysis of history, may prove correct. But there’s something brave and bracing to me about the way Homeland has tackled the issues and environment of our own time, rather than reaching back into our history to explore the psychological contours of debates that are essentially settled, and settled for the better. Mad Men explores a broader universe through the lens of its advertising agency (and its much larger core cast) than Homeland does from within the intelligence community, but it sometimes does so with less courage. It’s a show that’s much more interested in exploring Don Draper’s reaction to having to put up with a token black employee than with the experiences of Dawn, SCDP’s African-American pioneer, herself. The show tells us that sexism is damaging to both men and women, and than white men could be shocked when their obliviousness was breached. These are things I think we know, gussied up in beautiful clothes and gilded with performances that are sometimes exceptional.

Homeland, by contrast, is concerned with the urgent present rather than the weight of history. At a moment when President Obama’s drone program raises profoundly difficult questions about how to regulate the president’s right to kill, Homeland has charged into the debate with an exploration of the impact of the people who are killed because they are in the way of drone strikes, and how those strikes can be used to powerfully shift opinion against the United States. At a time when large numbers of Americans persist, against all evidence and reason, in believing that our president is a foreigner and a secret Muslim so they won’t have to accept that their nation actually chose a black man to occupy its highest office, Homeland has given us a sensitive, even tender portrait of a convert to Islam, presenting the practice of his faith as beautiful and sanctified, who hides his religion (something that will become an issue in the second season premiere next Sunday). And in Carrie Mathison, Homeland‘s given us a female lead who is damaged less by history than by the things that make her brilliant. These are narrower concerns than the broad societal forces Mad Men explores, but that specificity doesn’t make the show less bold: instead, it makes it more painful and immediate.
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Awards are always a terribly flawed way of determining what makes for good popular culture. Limits on the number of nominees lock deserving contenders out of their categories. Differences between the people who watch television shows or movies and the people in the pool assigned to judge them can produce some truly baffling biases and decisions. And winning doesn’t automatically transform a show’s prospects of staying on the air or an actor’s chance of getting good work in the future. But all of those caveats aside, it can be hugely satisfying to see a small show get the recognition you assume it’ll be denied, or an actor break barriers. And if you want better television, here are the shows and performances you should root for get whatever boost it’s possible to wring out of the Emmys on Sunday.

COMEDY SERIES
Who’s Nominated:
The Big Bang Theory
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Girls
Modern Family
30 Rock
Veep

Who Should Win: Girls

Why: There are a lot of legacy shows on this list, and some very notable omissions, particularly Parks and Recreation, which had a much stronger season than its network counterpart 30 Rock. Given that, I have to root for Girls, one of the few comedies to arrive on television knowing exactly what it was and what its strengths were, even if during its run, creator Lena Dunham had to confront some of its more notable weaknesses and absences, particularly when it came to race. Flawed though it may be, those of us rooting for more personal, low-budget shows—and who would like to see folks of color get the opportunities Dunham and Louis C.K. have—should hope for Girls to take home the statuette over more commercial favorites like The Big Bang Theory.

COMEDY ACTOR
Who’s Nominated:
Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory
Larry David as Himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm
Don Cheadle as Marty Kaan in House of Lies
Louis C.K. as Louie in Louie
Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock
Jon Cryer as Alan Harper in Two and a Half Men

Who Should Win: Louis C.K. or Don Cheadle

Why: It’s impossible to compare C.K.’s exploration of wounded and uncertain middle-aged masculinity and Cheadle’s turn as a hyped-up management consultant struggling to raise his potentially transgender son with tenderness and consideration. House of Lies is an inconsistent mess in comparison to the jewel-like Louie. But C.K. isn’t exactly lacking in recognition. And Cheadle’s playing a character who’s more distant from his real self than C.K. Plus, a black actor hasn’t won the Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Emmy since Robert Guillaume for Benson in 1985.

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A great deal of discussion about television’s breakout period has focused on the extent to which television has equaled, or even replaced the novel in the best shows’ sprawling explorations of huge groups of characters, social issues, and the idiosyncrasies of American life. But last season, and I think in this upcoming season of television, we have a number of shows with different ambition that are struggling within their forms: they want to be movies or miniseries, and are trying to figure out how how to stretch their plots over 22 episodes, much less multiple seasons. The prime existing example of that kind of show is Revenge, the story of a woman coming back to have her way with the people who framed her father for complicity with terrorism, a decision that lead to his death. The show initially started with its protagonist, Emily Thorne (Emily Van Camp) doing in an enemy per week, but given how short her enemies’ list really was, the show lost momentum after she got rid of the easy marks and had to stretch out her stalking of the Big Bads. It’s a setup that might have worked brilliantly and nastily as a six-episode miniseries, but got ponderous towards the end, and is hard to imagine working all the way through a second season unless her battle escalates to full-on trench warfare in the Hamptons:

This fall television season features a number of new shows, all of which I like, but none of which seem sustainable over the long term. On ABC’s Last Resort, the crew of a nuclear submarine refuse their orders and take over a small tropical island which they declare independent. The idea of taking Gotham hostage with a nuclear weapon barely seemed plausible over a period of nine months in The Dark Knight Rises, and it’s hard for me to see how a viable stalemate would persist for years or the conspiracy around the orders the crew got to nuke Pakistan can stay undetected and unbusted for that long either. Nashville, also on that network, features a rivalry between two country singers played by Connie Britton and Hayden Panettiere, but it’s hard to believe they can remain in a perpetual state of animosity—tours last only so long—or what the show plans to do after playing out its B story, about the Nashville mayoral election. Fox’s midseason show The Following, about a serial killer who develops a following during his imprisonment, has an even more limited premise: there can only be so many people willing to sign up to commit mass murder or to stab themselves in the eye to mess with the FBI. The case can’t go on forever unless the show wants to abandon its core dynamic, a rivalry between Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy. That show, at least, is beginning with a 15-episode season because that’s the number per year Bacon was willing to commit to.

To an extent, it seems like Revenge was written with the expectation that it couldn’t possibly get a full-season order, and the same may be the case with Last Resort, which is excellent, but high-concept and will air in an extremely difficult 8 PM Thursday timeslot. But it’s really too bad that networks don’t have some quarterly or mini-series sized time slots that they could use for concepts that are fascinating, but don’t fit neatly into the 22 episode season. The season length is essentially arbitrary, and in so much as it has a rationale, it’s a commercial rather than an artistic one, a way to get to the syndication threshhold of 100 episodes as quickly as possible without burning out actors or writers. But miniseries or shorter runs could be a way to make truly must-see TV again, as appeared to be the case with Kevin Costner’s run on Hatfields & McCoys earlier this summer. I understand the difficulties of sinking resources into one-time productions for a business model that’s based on monetizing the same content multiple times.

But when I think about it, I still think one of the shows I enjoyed last season was ABC’s The River, a horror story about a group of Amazonian explorers who go looking for their long-lost leader. The show had its flaws, including some casting problems. But when it was cancelled after the short run of its first season, it went out with a genuinely terrifying image, of the river shifting to trap the crew forever. That, more than a clear resolution or explanation, or wringing everything out of the characters that could possibly be obtained with them, was some thrilling television. There wasn’t a repetitive episode, a moment that made me feel like the show was in a rut, just a scary economy to the show’s forward progress. I’d rather have less of a good concept executed well than one wrung painfully dry, as CBS is doing to How I Met Your Mother right now. And I’d love for networks to find their way to building some flexibility into the schedule to give stories the amount of space they actually need. It’s not only in my interests. If the broadcast networks are going to complain that cable’s beating them in awards nominations because those networks only need to produce eight to fifteen episodes of a show, the broadcast networks might consider whether it would behoove them to play the game, at least sometimes, by the new rules.

Over at Deadline, Ray Richmond puts the five nominations for non-white actors out of 94 acting nominations handed out by the Emmys this year in historical context:

One of the dirty little secrets that haunts the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences is its woeful (some might even say shameful) track record in honoring African-American actors and actresses with Emmy Awards. Consider that were Giancarlo Esposito of AMC’s Breaking Bad to win this year for supporting actor in a drama series, or the mixed-race Maya Rudolph to take the comedy guest actress prize for NBC’s Saturday Night Live, they would become the first black performers to win in their respective categories ever. Similarly, if Don Cheadle triumphs in the lead actor in a comedy race for his work in the Showtime half-hour House of Lies, he’d become only the second African-American in history to win in that category.

In fact, the four lead comedy actor/actress and supporting comedy actor/actress races have found African-American performers winning Emmys a grand total of four times–once in each category. Combining the victories for black actors and actresses in all 16 performing categories throughout the 63-year history of the Primetime Emmys results in 35, or roughly 5% of the total number of statuettes handed out.

Awards may not change everything. They’re not an iron-clad guarantee of future success—in fact, they can lock people in to the kind of roles that made them successful in the first place. And an acting Emmy may not automatically open the doors for an actor who wants to produce, or write, or direct. But they are a credential none the less, a testament to a general consensus on the quality of someone’s career, and it may help when it comes to getting in to read for desirable parts and to negotiating lucrative contracts. The pool of non-white actors who get regular work in television is already small enough. If those actors are ending up with a smaller portion of valuable credentials than their white counterparts, that means they’re losing out on leverage, and the chance to make what they will of it.

Deadline’s roundtable on female-driven comedy has some interesting stuff in it, particularly these observations from House of Lies co-executive producer Jessika Borsiczky on the state of women’s employment behind the camera in television, which mostly serves to illustrate that things are good relative only to the movies:

We are sort of hitting a place where there’s some real seniority to women in television. When I started at HBO (in the movie division) in 1992 I certainly wasn’t running television shows, it took a long time…We have two women on the staff and three men. I ran an action movie company, and in 90 percent of the meetings I’d be the only woman in the room. When I shifted to television, it was a much more balanced environment. There are more women in comedy – the last show I ran was Flash Forward, and there are a lot more men in science fiction. I think it’s really important to be expressive and not self-conscious in a writers’ room when you’re going for comedy. On our show it’s not only women’s issues, but also race. We devoted an entire episode of House of Lies to anal sex, you have to know going in that when you are breaking that story there are going to be some very raw moments in the room. I have to say nobody felt uncomfortable, and we were laughing our heads off. That being said, there are limits, I know stories of women who were discriminated against for taking maternity leave, or sexually discriminated against by their bosses, I think that still exists.

An industry where you face the prospect of discrimination for taking maternity leave you’re allowed by your contract is probably not one that’s going to be exceptionally thoughtful and sensitive in its explorations of the issues faced by women in their real lives.

I’m also really interested in the arguments Borsiczky and other women in the roundtable make in favor of a boundary-pushing environment in the writers’ room that seems to imply that women have to be sure they want to be in that sort of environment before they proceed. From what I’ve seen of folks writing television dialogue in the moment, it absolutely is a tough editing process: every line is diamond-cut, and that requires a particular kind of ego to hold up under. But in terms of busting boundaries, you can get there both by creating safe spaces and by making your willingness to go to difficult places a mark of toughness. The ability to tackle impolite topics is not gendered, and just as women can thrive in filthy, frattish writers’ rooms, I’m sure there are a lot of men who would do just fine in the kind of bonded environment Lena Dunham, for example, talks about trying to create on Girls.

I still think Glee is a wildly inconsistent, and frequently shallow show—”Leprechaun,” for example, in which stupid-smart cheerleader Brittany became convinced an Irish exchange student was a magical creature, was so offensively stupid that everyone involved in it should spend time in television jail. But I’m increasingly convinced that Naya Rivera should be nominated for an Emmy for her performance as closeted lesbian cheerleader Santana.

She’s perhaps the most complete player in the show’s cast: Rivera may have been underused in prior seasons, but then the show was smart enough to realize that she had a delightful alto that she can put to work channeling everyone from Amy Winehouse to Christine McVie. She can dance—if not as well as Heather Morris, who can’t match her voice or her performance. And she’s acted the hell out of a nuanced transition from pure mean girl cheerleader to hugely vulnerable, lovelorn mortal girl.

There’s no question that Chris Colfer’s performance as Kurt Hummel has been charming, and an important landmark for gay teenagers during a disturbing outbreak of vicious bullying. But the character also has its limitations—Kurt is overwhelmingly, obviously, unquestionably gay. His coming out story was inevitable, as his trajectory towards a bigger city. It’s not a bad stereotype—and neither is the football player who eventually comes out, transfers schools, and ends his reign as a bully. But these stories have been told before, whether in the form of Larry Blaisdell, the gay football player on Buffy the Vampire Slayer who dies defending Sunnydale from the Mayor on Graduation Day to the many coming-out-in-and-living-more-fully in the big city stories from Ellen to Will and Grace.

Santana’s story isn’t just a coming-out narrative: it’s a story of self-realization. The character’s most prominent characteristic in the first season of the show was the fact that she’d had sex with lots of male characters, whether wiling away time with Puck or divesting Finn of his virginity. Her acknowledgement that she’s in love with Brittany, her best friend, has been the product of multiple seasons and a lot of very hard character work. And it looks like her road to coming out could be much more difficult than Kurt’s. While there’s no question that bullying is a serious issue and Glee presented it as such, Kurt’s revelation wasn’t a surprise to most people, and he’s been vigorously backed up by his father. Santana, instead, is about to become the object of a political attack ad—and it’s not clear how her parents will react. And even if they’re fine, even if, as Finn puts it, her fellow students don’t care, Santana is going to be exposed to a wider, less friendly world. Her hesitance to publicly embrace Brittany may cost her that relationship, and it seems entirely possible that being forced to come clean may not, in the short term, actually be worth it. And unlike Kurt, there isn’t a clear plan to get Santana out of Lima and into a bigger, broader-minded world that will embrace her. That’s a harder, less satisfying story to tell, but it’s an important one, and Rivera’s nailed it. If she keeps this up, she should absolutely be in contention for a Best Supporting Actress Emmy—and Glee‘s showrunners should resist their tendency towards the absolutely bananas and continue giving her this kind of material.

During last night’s Emmy liveblog, Libby said something that clarified my frustration with the fact that Louie didn’t win anything (in addition to the fact that I feel like I’ll never get to see Louis C.K. make an awards-show speech): “Louie is changing the landscape of television and entertainment as we know it,” she typed. “I know that I should just be grateful that I get to experience his amazing work and that the Emmys even know he exists. But what would we be if we didn’t keep hoping for something better?”

It’s great to see directors like Martin Scorsese wanting to work in television, I feel like Boardwalk Empire always had an advantage in that HBO spent $5 million on its core set and between $20 and $30 million on the pilot. You really have to try hard to make a show that looks bad for that amount of money, or to actively hire actors who don’t have chemistry. It’s much, much harder to do that for $250,000. C.K. has to be on all the time, he always has to hit his marks on the writing, his personal connections are what pull in interesting guest stars. It’s like gymnasts getting points for the difficulty of the routine.

And in a world of declining cable subscriptions and an irreversible push towards multi-platform viewing, I’d guess that scripted television is probably going to have to either get cheaper, or become a lusher spectacle supported by extremely high overseas syndication prices. Shows will have to go the Louie route on one extreme or the Game of Thrones route on the other. And there are more gorgeous, expensive scripted shows (it’ll be interesting to see if network viewers and international deals come out in numbers that will support Terra Nova) than there are extremely cheap, extremely smart ones right now. It’s just as important to recognize the innovators in the latter category than the former, especially if they’re the ones who eventually save us from the networks’ cost-savings love affairs with reality television.

The bridge is yours.

-ABC is developing two Jekyll and Hyde shows, but which will be Jekyll and which will be Hyde and will the network disappear into a hall of mirrors?

-A comprehensive look at the ways George Lucas has tinkered with Star Wars.

-I’m totally on board with this Emmy hosting proposal.

-The Rocky Horror Picture Show is too risque for Atlanta.

-Tropes Community has yet to appropriate: psychosexual thriller.