Final 2017 Emmy Winner Predictions – TV MOVIE/LIMITED SERIES/VARIETY/REALITY

Erik Anderson September 14, 2017

An historic win might happen for **RuPaul’s Drag Race** plus a tough fight in Limited Series with **Feud**, **Big Little Lies** and **The Night Of** for Primetime Emmys

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Not too long after the nominations came out in July we were all thinking that Limited Series was going to be a battle between Big Little Lies and Feud: Bette and Joan. But then the Creative Arts Emmys happened last week and The Night Of came in and swooped on some major wins including picture editing and both sound awards. It ended up with four, the most for a limited series. Feud, not surprisingly won hairstyling and makeup, but shockingly lost two categories that most pundits felt it had in the bag – main title credits and main title theme music. Both of those went to the freshman drama series Stranger Things. That could prove that Feud isn’t quite the competitor we thought it was. Big Little Lies won the inaugural music supervision award as well as costumes and an important win, casting. For our experts that gives it the edge in Limited Series and we are all predicting it to win. But it’s not a safe prediction; The Night Of seems poised for an upset here.

We’re all universally in on Black Mirror: San Junipero winning TV Movie on Sunday. It’s the only exciting or interesting entry in a dull category and it sustained its buzz for months leading up to its nomination.

In the TV Movie/Limited Series acting categories the Emmy Experts surprisingly find themselves in agreement in three of the four. We’re all in for The Night Of‘s Riz Ahmed to win Lead Actor, Nicole Kidman in Lead Actress for Big Little Lies and. Alfred Molina in Supporting Actor for Feud: Bette and Joan is the favorite of four of us (we’ll see if Nicole is right). Supporting Actress sees four of us going for Laura Dern (Big Little Lies) with Fred seeing Dern’s co-star Shailene Woodley taking the prize. None of these feel solid though, it’s a wild year. Jessica Lange is such an Emmy favorite now in the Limited Series acting categories and she was indeed the frontrunner for quite a while. Kidman came on strong and works the circuit hard, plus she’s having a banner year both in film and television. It could go to either and both would be deserving. An upset outside of those two would be surprising but Carrie Coon (Fargo) might be able to pull that off. She was probably close to a nomination for The Leftovers this year as well and this would be a way to reward the TCA winner for both.

In directing we’re split again, three ways. Votes for The Night Of, Big Little Lies and Feud: Bette and Joan make up our predicted winners. It’s hard to see Fargo or Genius breaking in here and upsetting. Writing we’re uniformly behind Big Little Lies in what marks a huge TV comeback for 10-time Emmy winner David E. Kelley. It’s been nine years since Kelley was invited to the Emmy party and this seems like an easy win for him.

In Variety Talk Series we all see Last Week Tonight with John Oliver repeating this year but Emmy host Stephen Colbert could definitely give chase with The Late Show. Both shows went deep into politics before, during and since the presidential election and both with resounding success. Saturday Night Live, which enjoyed its highest ratings in 20 years with its election-heavy season, should easily take the Variety Sketch Series.

Reality-Competition Program might be one of the most anticipated of the night. In its 9th season, RuPaul’s Drag Race was finally nominated for the top award and last week at the Creative Arts Emmys the show won three awards including picture editing and a second win in a row for RuPaul Charles as Reality Host. The show has definitely become mainstream and even though it’s in competition with previous winners and nominees (and this category is notorious for being slow to churn out new winners) we’re almost all in agreement that Drag Race will win. Only Fred is denying that prediction, instead going for The Amazing Race to take its crown back from current champ The Voice.

Here are the ranked predictions in the TV Movie/Limited Series, Variety and Reality-Competition categories from the Emmy Experts. You can see our predictions in Comedy here and Drama will be up tomorrow.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.