2023 Emmys: How much screen time does each Best Comedy Guest Actor nominee have?
Nearly three decades after he received his first Emmy nomination for his comedic guest performance on “Frasier” in 1995, Nathan Lane finally won the TV academy’s favor last year with his work on “Only Murders in the Building.” Now that he has immediately picked up another bid for the same Hulu series, he has a shot at following Jay Thomas (“Murphy Brown”) and Mel Brooks (“Mad About You”) as the third man to take the Best Comedy Guest Actor prize in two consecutive years. In this case, his submitted performance is almost half the size of the one that brought him the gold in the first place.
Whereas Lane’s Emmy-winning performance in the episode “The Boy from 6B” added up to seven minutes and 51 seconds of screen time, his appearance in season two’s “Here’s Looking at You” amounts to just four minutes and nine seconds, or 11.31% of the episode. He and his five challengers’ actual screen time and percentage averages are significantly higher at eight minutes and 33 seconds and 15.45%, respectively. This data was calculated using a simple definition of stand-alone screen time, which is any time a given actor can be seen on screen or heard off screen. Contiguous moments wherein the performer silently and non-visibly remains in scenes were not counted.
Lane belongs to a group of four male comedy guest nominees whose screen times land below the current lineup’s average. Unsurprisingly, the numbers are heavily skewed by “The Bear” actor Jon Bernthal, who only shows up in 17 seconds (or 0.59%) of the FX series’ inaugural closing chapter, “Braciole.” This constitutes about 8% of his first season performance, the entire rest of which is contained within the earlier episode, “Ceres.”
Right ahead of Lane is his former 2022 competitor, Sam Richardson, whose single-episode reprisal of his Edwin Akufo role on Apple TV+’s “Ted Lasso” adds up to six minutes and 20 seconds. His percentage in the 66-minute-long “International Break,” however, is noticeably lower than Lane’s, at 9.58. Not far off in terms of actual time on screen is Oliver Platt, who clocks in at seven minutes and 11 seconds (or 23.75%) of the “Dogs” episode of “The Bear.” This is his fifth Emmy nomination and first in this category following guest bids for “The West Wing” (2001) and “Nip/Tuck” (2008) and supporting ones for “Huff” (2005-2006).
Next is 2019 victor Luke Kirby, whose third notice for Prime Video’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” comes for his eight-minute and 38-second turn in the series finale, “Four Minutes.” Given the episode’s whopping length of 75 minutes, his resulting percentage stands just one-tenth of a point above Lane’s. Lastly, skewing the data in the other direction is Pedro Pascal, whose debut “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig amounts to 24 minutes and 43 seconds (or 36.02%) of screen time. The largest portion of his time on the NBC show (16%) was accumulated during his second live sketch, “Waking Up,” while the smallest (5%) is attributed to the prerecorded “Wing Pit” parody ad.
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