The Biggest Emmy Upsets of the Past 25 Years

Best Actor in a Drama, 2013

Whether you were in the market for sirloin stake or a big fat ham sandwich, there was plenty on the menu to choose from this year. Jon Hamm and Bryan Cranston did their usual phenomenal work on Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Damian Lewis elevated sometimes shaky material as triple-agent Marine-turned-terrorist-turned-informant Nicholas Brody on Homeland, a role for which he’d won the previous year. But the victory of Jeff Daniels as The Newsroom‘s bloviator-in-chief Will McAvoy was all the more bizarre because of the slightly less top-shelf alternatives available to voters, if that’s what they really wanted. Why not, say, go for Kevin Spacey, who gave great hambone and drawled his way through House of Cards? And if it was fusty and blustery but ultimately good-hearted you wanted, Hugh Bonneville’s take on that template as Downton Abbey‘s Lord Grantham was altogether more appealing.

I wrote about the biggest surprises in recent Emmy history for Rolling Stone. Spoiler alert: 2007 was crazy, man.

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