Ranker Runs Down the 2022 Emmys

Can the feelings of Ranker voters help us predict who will win the biggest awards at the 74th Primetime Emmys? We put our Oscars prediction system to the test on TV’s biggest night.

The 74th Emmy Awards are September 12, and critics are rolling out their predictions for who will take home awards during the biggest night in television. This year, nominees for the most prestigious categories — outstanding drama series, outstanding comedy series, and outstanding limited or anthology series — feature plenty of familiar titles, including a few former winners, as well as some new blood. Will proven champions like Ted Lasso and Succession win out again? Will oft-frustrated favorites like Better Call Saul and Stranger Things finally be rewarded? Or will up-and-comers like Squid Game and Abbott Elementary snatch underdog victories?

We at Ranker have used voter sentiment on each year’s Oscar nominees to make predictions about who will ultimately win best picture, with some surprising successes. This year, we thought we’d try our hand at the Emmys: we looked at the voter sentiment for the nominees in each of the three primary categories. The shows with the largest positive-to-negative vote ratio are at the top of the list, while the shows with the lowest ratios are at the bottom. We looked back at Emmy nominations over the years looking for patterns, seeing if the nominee that was most popular among Ranker voters was also frequently the nominee that ended up taking home the Emmy. We used our analysis to make three tentative predictions about 2022.

Outstanding Drama Series

The nominees for outstanding drama series this year include 2020 winner Succession, as well as three perpetual bridesmaids hoping 2022 is the year they walk the aisle themselves. This is Ozark’s third and final nomination, as the show came to a conclusion this year; Stranger Things Season 4 earned the show its fourth Emmy nom; and most impressive of all, Better Call Saul racked up six nominations for outstanding drama, having appeared in the nominations list for the award in 2020, 2019, 2017, 2016, and 2015.

The question is, will the award go to a veteran nominee or a breakout hit? While it might feel like Saul and co. are due for a win, the show wouldn’t be the first frequent nominee to be snubbed: Downton Abbey failed to win the category five times during its six-season run, and while critics’ favorite The Americans was nominated in this category in 2016 and 2018, it lost both times to Game of Thrones, a four-time winner. That said, the Emmys tend to favor shows that have “paid their dues” — in the last decade, the only show to take home the Emmy for outstanding drama series without being nominated for the award before was The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017. Even Game of Thrones lost a few times before launching on its record-tying streak of victories.

The 2022 Nominees

  1. Squid Game (77% approval)

  2. Yellowjackets (72% approval)

  3. Stranger Things (71% approval)

  4. Severance (68% approval)

  5. Euphoria (62% approval)

  6. Ozark (60% approval)

  7. Succession (60% approval)

  8. Better Call Saul (57% approval)

The nominee most beloved by Ranker fans this year is Squid Game — the surprise hit from Korea has been voted on 8,104 times by Ranker readers so far, with 6,211 of those votes indicating a positive sentiment about the show. On the other end of the spectrum is Better Call Saul, which has racked up 73,990 votes on Ranker lists like The Best Written Current TV Shows (13K votes) since 2015, with 42,338 of them indicating positive sentiment.

Since Game of Thrones ended, the Emmys have tended to give the outstanding drama series award to shows that rank somewhere in the middle in terms of sentiment among our voters. For example, last year, The Crown was victorious despite being the sixth most popular show of the eight nominees; in 2020, Succession was the fourth-ranked show in terms of sentiment, proving more popular among our readers than Killing Eve, but less popular than The Mandalorian. That said, when a cultural sensation like Game of Thrones happens, the tastes of viewers and critics tend to get closer, and massively popular series win out on Emmy night. While Squid Game has never been nominated, neither have two of the middle options, Severance and Euphoria. For us, this comes down to a choice between international phenomenon Squid Game and prestige darling Ozark.

PREDICTED WINNER: Squid Game

As rare as it is to give newcomers the Emmy for outstanding drama, Emmy voters just haven’t given much indication over the years that Ozark is really deserving of a win. The last crime drama to take home the award was Breaking Bad back in 2014, which makes the most popular series on the list, Squid Game, the safer bet.

Outstanding Comedy Series

Ted Lasso, the 2021 outstanding comedy series winner, appeared in the nominations again, as did 2018 victor The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. What We Do in the Shadows has been nominated once before, as has Hacks. Barry has been nominated for a third time for its third season, while Curb Your Enthusiasm hopes that, after 22 years on the air, it will finally get recognition from the Emmys. But arguably, the shows to watch are brand-new entries: Only Murders in the Building and Abbott Elementary, both series that debuted in late 2021.

If you look at the winners of this award throughout the 2010s and earlier, there’s a pretty recognizable pattern: 30 Rock won three years in a row starting in 2007, then Modern Family put together five consecutive victories from 2010 to 2014, a string followed directly by three wins for Veep. Clearly, the Emmys have tended to reward past winners. But as television has changed, comedy has become a more competitive category, with shows like Fleabag and Ted Lasso earning the kind of praise normally reserved for dramas. That helps to explain why, since 2018, the outstanding comedy award has gone to a different show each year.

Photo: Apple TV

The 2022 Nominees

  1. Ted Lasso (68% approval)

  2. Only Murders in the Building (65% approval)

  3. What We Do in the Shadows (63% approval)

  4. Abbott Elementary (59% approval)

  5. Barry (59% approval)

  6. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (57% approval)

  7. Curb Your Enthusiasm (47% approval)

  8. Hacks (39% approval)

The most popular nominee among our voters is Ted Lasso, last year’s returning champion. The fish-out-of-water sports comedy has a smaller viewer base among our readers than some of the others covered in this article, with a total of 3,379 votes for the show across lists like The Best And Nicest Feel-Good TV Shows (14K votes), 2,291 of which indicate positive sentiment. Hacks isn’t so popular among our readership, with 626 of a total 1,022 votes for the series indicating negative sentiment.

As with drama nominees, comedy winners have tended to either be very popular with viewers or middling — almost never are they the least popular show of the bunch (sorry, Hacks). Ted Lasso was also the most popular nominee for outstanding comedy series in 2021, though Schitt’s Creek, the 2020 winner, was only the fourth-most popular series among our voters, as was 2019 winner Fleabag. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the first show to break the dynastic tradition of this category, was the third most popular. The #4 spot seems like the best place to be right now, and though it’s a close call, Abbott Elementary narrowly beats out Barry with a positive-to-negative vote ratio 0.4% higher than the Bill Hader-led hitman comedy.

PREDICTED WINNER: Abbott Elementary

Though it’s certainly not impossible Emmy voters could return to their old ways and pick Ted Lasso for a second consecutive time, the patterns of the past indicate to us that Abbott Elementary is where the smart money is.

Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series

In the outstanding limited or anthology series category, because almost no TV shows are nominated for this award more than once, it makes predicting a winner a little trickier. Of the last five winners — Big Little Lies, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Chernobyl, Watchmen, and The Queen’s Gambit — three are dramas based on real historical events, while two are entirely fictional. Beyond a slight preference for real-life stories, we have little outside of Ranker that might point us in the direction of the 2022 winner.

Photo: Hulu

The 2022 Nominees

  1. Dopesick (67% approval)

  2. Inventing Anna (58% approval)

  3. The Dropout (57% approval)

  4. The White Lotus (48% approval)

  5. Pam & Tommy (47% approval)

Dopesick, Hulu’s drama about the origins of America’s opioid crisis, is the most positively viewed series of these nominees, with 67% of votes across lists like The Best New TV Dramas Of The Last Few Years indicating positive sentiment. Pam & Tommy, another ripped-from-the-headlines miniseries from Hulu, is the least popular limited series to earn an Emmy nod in 2022, though The White Lotus also has a net-negative sentiment among Ranker voters.

Unlike the other categories, in previous years, the miniseries that ended up winning the Emmy were among the most popular of their cohort. The Queen’s Gambit is the most popular of last year’s nominees, and Chernobyl has a more positive sentiment among our voters than any other nominee for outstanding limited or anthology series in 2019. Watchmen and Assassination are both the second-most popular shows of their respective sets of nominees. If the top two choices are Dopesick and Inventing Anna, and both are based on real stories, this prediction will largely come down to intuition.

PREDICTED WINNER: Dopesick

However you feel about Anna Delvey, the con artist who is the subject of Netflix’s Inventing Anna, her story will likely impact fewer people than that of the ongoing addiction crisis in this country. Because Emmy voters have demonstrated an interest in miniseries that tell politically or culturally relevant stories, the edge in this head-to-head goes to Dopesick.

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.