Hey, Emmy voters! Don't forget ...

On the eve of the announcement of this year's Emmy nominees, we offer last-minute suggestions for best actors, shows, writing and more.

By Salon staff

Read more: Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment TV Features

July 16, 2008 | Here's what we know about the Emmy nominations, which the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences will announce on Thursday morning: Katherine Heigl will assuredly not be nominated. We also know -- thanks to an early short-list announcement from the Academy -- which shows are officially in contention for outstanding comedy and drama series mentions.

Another sure thing: We're bound to be disappointed when some deserving soul -- an actor or show that earns our love week after week -- gets overlooked. And so Salon's staff has compiled a list of people we're hoping to see get congratulatory wake-up calls from their agents later this week. From our lips, to Emmy's ears …

Tracy Morgan, NBC's "30 Rock" (Supporting actor in a comedy series)
Tracy Morgan is an actor/comedian with a history of DUI arrests, accusations of bad behavior with women, and all-around erratic choices. Maybe that's why it's easy to dismiss his performance on "30 Rock" as Tracy Jordan, a Hollywood actor/comedian with all the stability of a box of plutonium. Yet in much the same way his character energizes "TGS," "30 Rock's" late-night show within the show, Morgan brings something indispensable to the "30 Rock" mix. He tempers Alec Baldwin's corporate menace and Tina Fey's mustard-stained snark with utterly convincing outrageousness. It takes a talented performer to create a character who had a novelty hit with "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah," a guy who would prefer to cut off his foot rather than wear an alcohol monitoring device. His "straight-up mentally ill" Jordan is the id of the show, an appealingly overmedicated, porn-loving, dog-fighting conspiracy theorist. And nothing made me laugh harder this season than Morgan's tossed-off observation that "My genius has come alive, like toys when you turn your back." He could have mugged it. He could have oversold it. But Morgan said it with the confidence of one who might really believe it. And for a giddy split second, I did too. Give that man a prize.

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams

"Flight of the Conchords" on HBO (Outstanding comedy series)
If there is a point at which underplaying ceases to pay dividends, "Flight of the Conchords" has yet to reach it and may never. New Zealand musical comics Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie are so low-key they make Bob Newhart look manic and emotive, but the sustained dance of deadpan in which they engage is relieved by brilliant gusts of Dennis Potter-style musical fantasy, as the Conchords parody everyone from David Bowie to the Pet Shop Boys to Barry White (the hilarious "Business Time"). This fish-out-of-water show celebrates failure in all its infinite variety, without once being heartless. And speaking of heart, how about some Emmy love for Rhys Darby, as a deeply inadequate band manager, and Kristen Schaal as Mel, the obsessive fan who enlists her own husband as a stalking accomplice?

-- Louis Bayard

Jon Hamm, AMC's "Mad Men" (Lead actor in a drama series)
If Jon Hamm doesn't get nominated for his transfixing turn as '60s ad executive Don Draper of the AMC drama "Mad Men," then the gods must be crazy. While it's easy enough to get behind such likely nominees as James Spader, Hugh Laurie or Denis Leary, all of whom play larger-than-life characters prone to bouts of anger and moments of profound longing punctuated by a colorful assortment of psychotic tics, Hamm has a far more difficult challenge on his plate: Let the viewer follow the ebb and flow of this understated, repressed, vaguely dissatisfied family man's emotional tides. But somehow Hamm never hits a false note, never tries to pander by making Draper too likable or slick, never falls into growling macho territory. Don Draper is intimidating, haunted and complicated in ways that are unfamiliar to us, and it's impossible to imagine any other actor pulling off that tightrope walk the way Jon Hamm does.

-- Heather Havrilesky Elizabeth Perkins, Showtime's "Weeds" (Supporting actress in a comedy series)
Elizabeth Perkins has the toughest job on "Weeds." On the show, Perkins plays Celia, Nancy Botwin's (Mary-Louise Parker) neighborly frenemy. Her character is a drunk, a racist and a hypocritical puritan, but Perkins manages to humanize her, and even to make her strangely likable. When Celia taunts her daughter, calling her fat and ugly, we cringe not only because she's a terrible mother, but because Perkins gives her an aura of delirious and teetering vulnerability.

This past season, Celia has been less of a presence on the show than in past years, but her scenes, as always, have included many of its most memorable bits. One of its story lines involved her budding romance with a sleazy land developer (Matthew Modine), and the scene in which she unveils her cancer-scarred body to him, petrified of rejection, provided the show with a rare tender moment. When she later discovers her lover screwing Nancy on his office desk, the look of hatred and self-disgust on Celia's face should break even the coldest Emmy voter's heart.

-- Thomas Rogers

"The Wire" on HBO (Outstanding drama series; writing for a drama series)
While "Sopranos" creator David Chase could fill his recycling bin with gold statuettes, "The Wire" has been nominated for exactly one Emmy, in 2005, for writing. (The show lost, to a miniseries about Peter Sellers.) That outsider status has been perfectly fitting for a show that was, after all, filmed in Baltimore and trafficked in none of the hour-long drama clichés so popular during its run. Cases weren't solved. Good guys died. And justice was a dish served cold, if ever. Created by David Simon, a former journalist, and Ed Burns, a former homicide detective, "The Wire" had the feel of a deeply reported documentary. Add to that the imaginative talents of top-notch crime fiction writers -- Dennis Lehane, George P. Pelecanos, Richard Price -- and you have nothing less than one of the best series ever written for television. Season 5 was not the strongest -- Simon, wrestling with ghosts, sometimes seemed myopic (or agenda'd) in his Baltimore Sun story line. (We should debate about the best season sometime, actually; I can see the argument for Season 4, but I'll choose Season 1, a narrative that's as streamlined as a luxury jet.) But even a bit off its game, "The Wire" dared to sustain a multicharacter melodrama of operatic proportions, taking the America we do not want to see and turning it into a show we could not miss.

-- Sarah Hepola

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