The Diplomat is now an awards machine, and Keri Russell still has not won

The nominations for the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards, announced on 8 July and to be handed out on 14 September at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, confirmed something that was becoming obvious: Netflix’s The Diplomat has turned into a reliable awards show. It is also the show that keeps nominating Keri Russell for a prize she never wins.

A broad haul, not a single-star run

The Diplomat did not simply land its lead a nomination. Russell is up for the drama’s leading actress, and around her the show picked up supporting nods for Allison Janney, Rufus Sewell and Bradley Whitford, plus a writing nomination. That spread matters. A single acting nomination can be a performer carrying a middling series; a cluster of them across acting and writing is the Academy endorsing the show itself.

For a streaming drama built on people talking in rooms about foreign policy, that is a notable result, and it puts The Diplomat in the conversation for the drama categories rather than on their edge.

Eight and none

Which makes the statistic around its lead the sharper story. Russell now has eight Emmy nominations and no win: three for The Americans across its run, five now attached to The Diplomat. Eight nominations is a career other actors would trade for. Eight nominations without a statuette is a different kind of record, and it is not really a verdict on the work.

It is a verdict on how the drama-actress category behaves. Voters reward the performance in the season the industry has decided to crown, and in the years Russell was doing her best work the crown went elsewhere. The nomination is the recognition; the win is a scheduling accident of who else was eligible. A performer can be, by common agreement, one of the best on television for a decade and go home empty-handed eight times.

The other half of the ballot

Her partner Matthew Rhys is nominated the same night for two different projects, Apple’s comedy Widow’s Bay and Netflix’s limited series The Beast in Me, along with producing nominations. That the two of them are up for separate shows on the same evening is the detail the celebrity coverage has fixed on, and it is genuinely unusual. It is also beside the point of what the ballot shows.

What the nominations actually measure

The useful reading of this year’s list is structural. The Diplomat is now the kind of prestige streaming drama the Academy nominates by the handful, which is worth noting in a decade when the networks that once owned these categories barely appear in them. And its lead is the standing proof that a nomination and a win measure two different things: one tracks whether the work is good, the other tracks who else showed up that year.

On 14 September, Russell can make it one win from nine tries. If she does not, the record will say more about the category than the actress, as it has said for eight ballots already.