A Milestone For The T

Laverne Cox recently became the first openly transgender woman to receive an Emmy nod. Jos Truitt applauds the news:

Cox is certainly deserving of the nomination: she brings a depth and humanity to the role that is more than what’s in the script. Sophia’s interactions with her wife and fight to get the medical care she needed were powerful moments, and it’s fantastic to see the Emmys take notice.

Cox’s celebrity has been met with some bigoted responses. So, given the occasional fool in the media, like Kevin D Williamson who still thinks that Cox’s gender should be up for debate, it’s nice to see the Emmys committee underscore that Cox is a woman nominated as an actress, full stop.

Parker Molloy considers how far the film industry has come:

In the early 1980s, Caroline Cossey tried to follow up what was at the time a successful modeling career by taking on some acting work. After appearing as an uncredited featured extra in the 1981 James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, Cossey was outed by the tabloid News of the World when they ran a headline proclaiming “Bond Girl Was Born a Boy.” As she later recounted, the experience not only destroyed her career, but nearly drove her to suicide.

What we’re seeing now is a world in which being transgender is not necessarily the career-killer it once was. These gains – of Laverne Cox scooping an Emmy nomination, Candis Cayne appearing on shows like Elementary and Dirty, Sexy Money, and Jamie Clayton finding herself cast in a recurring role in an upcoming TV show—may be small, but they are a true sign of progress.

Meanwhile, Esther Breger wonders what the full field of nominations says about TV today:

Despite all the silliness, [yesterday] morning’s nominations – the glaring omissions and the boring deja vu – do indicate a larger cultural shift. When the Emmys overlooked The Sopranos‘ first season in 1999, awarding best drama to David E. Kelley’s campy legal procedural, The Practice, instead, the awards show was widely derided for being out of touch, unwilling to recognize cable shows that seemed unfamiliar. Fifteen years later, HBO is racking up 99 nominations, more than any other channel.

But just as shows like The Practice once crowded out innovative shows, the dominance of HBO and HBO-lite can overshadow the actually exciting TV being made today, across all channels. “Quality television is now platform-agnostic,” the TV Academy’s chief said [yesterday] morning, referring to services like Netflix. And he’s right. The defining character of this post-”Golden Age” TV era is plenty; cable, broadcast, and online streaming services all have brilliant shows and boring ones – and the great ones are as likely to look like pulpy fluff as gritty crime drama. Some of them will even have clones.