Prime Video cancelled “Spider-Noir” on Friday 4 September. The Creative Arts Emmys opened the next day at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, ran two nights, handed out 101 awards, and gave five of them to the show that had just been killed. Cinematography. Title design. Sound editing. Visual effects. Stunts. Nobody in that room had to reach for the irony, and by Sunday night the Television Academy had made the point five separate times.
The wins are worth naming one by one, because craft Emmys go to people rather than to a logo. Darran Tiernan took Outstanding Cinematography for a Series (One Hour) for “Step into My Office.” The title sequence won Outstanding Title Design for Mason Nicoll, Andrew Julien, Arik Weiss, Peter Pak, John Van Unen, Daniel Duda, Christian Arnsparger and Rachel Brickel. Ethan Beigel led a nine-person team to Outstanding Sound Editing for “The Man in the Mask.” Hnedel Maximore’s twelve-strong unit won Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Single Episode for “Nightmare on a Gurney.” And Freddy Bouciegues and Hugh Aodh O’Brien won for stunt coordination, which is where this stops being a straightforward story about a good-looking show.
A 1930s detective story about a grieving man in a mask won its Emmy in the comedy category.”
Because the stunt award “Spider-Noir” won is Outstanding Stunt Coordination for Comedy Programming. Not the drama race, which went to “The Boys” — the comedy one, where it beat “Beef,” “Palm Royale,” “Peacemaker,” “Poker Face” and “Tulsa King.” A rain-soaked period noir about a depressed private investigator was campaigned as a comedy, and the same classification turns up elsewhere this year: Lamorne Morris drew a Black Reel Television Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. That is an administrative detail rather than a scandal, but it points at something real. This was a show nobody could file, and a show nobody can file is a show nobody can advertise.
It lost the other six races, and the list of who beat it reads as its own kind of compliment. “Fallout” took production design for “The Wrangler,” edging out the work on “Step into My Office.” “The Pitt” beat it twice — Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup for “9:00 P.M.,” and Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics, where “Need Someone” by Gavin Brivik and Andrew Bird went past “The Devil You Know” by Warren Oak Felder, Sebastian Kole and Daniel Pemberton. “Widow’s Bay” took the dramatic score away from Kris Bowers and Michael Dean Parsons. “Pluribus” won sound mixing. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” won stunt performance. Five from eleven is a conversion rate most productions in that building would have signed for.
The scale of it is easy to miss if you only read the headline number. Eleven nominations made “Spider-Noir” the seventh most-nominated production of the entire Creative Arts Emmys, ahead of “Saturday Night Live,” “Fallout” and “The Oscars.” Five wins put it level with “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and behind only four productions across the whole weekend: “Widow’s Bay” on eight, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show on seven, and “DTF St. Louis” and “The Traitors” on six apiece. Narrow that to scripted series and the count is starker still. Exactly two shows won more Emmys that weekend than the one Amazon had cancelled on the Friday.
There is a detail buried in the title-design win that is almost too neat. Mason Nicoll, Peter Pak and Rachel Brickel were nominated twice in that single category — once for “Spider-Noir” and once for Apple TV’s “Smoke.” They beat themselves. The same thing happened in prosthetic makeup and went the other way: Vincent Van Dyke and Gabriel De Cunto were on both the “Spider-Noir” team and the “Fallout” team, so they were nominated against themselves and lost twice in one race, both times to “The Pitt.” Ryan Collins had the strangest weekend of anyone on the crew. He is on the sound editing team that won and the sound mixing team that lost, for the same show, in the same building, across the same two nights.
Look at which episodes the Academy kept picking and the show’s problem comes into focus. “Step into My Office” alone carried four of the eleven nominations — production design, cinematography, music composition and sound mixing — and converted one of them. Six of the series’ eight episodes are named somewhere on that list. Only two of the eleven races were series-level rather than tied to a single episode, those being title design and stunt coordination, and “Spider-Noir” won both. The Academy was not responding to one standout hour. It was responding to the way the whole thing was built, week after week, which is precisely the kind of quality that shows up on a budget line rather than in a viewing figure.
The Emmys were not this show’s first award, either. It won Best Superhero Series at the Critics’ Choice Super Awards earlier this year, tying with “The Boys,” while Nicolas Cage was nominated for Best Actor in a Superhero Series and Brendan Gleeson for Best Villain in a Series. A genre-fan jury and an industry craft branch arrived at the same verdict from opposite directions, months apart, and neither of them buys subscriptions.
What is left is thinner than it sounds. All eleven nominations were Creative Arts categories, so the main ceremony on 14 September has nothing on it for “Spider-Noir” — its Emmy run finished on Sunday night. One prize is still outstanding: it is up for Best Adaptation from a Comic Book or Graphic Novel at the Harvey Awards, which have not been handed out yet. So a cancelled show can still win something in the autumn, and this one may well, and it will change nothing. The order of events was made, praised, cancelled, decorated. Only the third of those was a decision anybody at Amazon actually sat down and took.
What Do You Think? Does winning five Emmys the weekend after a cancellation make Amazon’s decision look worse, or does it just prove that awards and subscriptions were never the same business? Should Sony shop a show with this much hardware on the shelf, or is one finished season the cleanest thing it could ever be? And when a 1930s noir wins its Emmy in the comedy category, is that a quirk of paperwork or the exact reason nobody knew how to sell it?
See you on the next binge!
