The fourth season of “Insecure” is the safest yet, using the show’s careful eye for detail to tell a single well-crafted story that ended up affecting all aspects of the lives of its two protagonists. And it was a season that was perhaps too easy to watch ending up being ignored by the Emmys. In its early seasons, “Insecure” vibrated at the awards season lag, having garnered two Golden Globe nominations and one Emmy nomination for lead actress Issa Rae, as well as two Emmy nominations for film. However, with its most successful installment yet, “Insecure” finally made its way with a nomination for Best Comedy Series, as well as recognition for both Rae and supporting actress Yvonne Orji, overdue recognition that works as a seal of approval for the establishment on a show that reached a new level in 2020. Given how long this kind of recognition for “Insecure” has been possible, this was perhaps the most exciting surprise of Emmy’s morning.
The fourth season of “Insecure” was a double act, establishing in its opening that the well-intentioned but somewhat adrift Issa (Rae) had lost more than her moorings: her friendship with Molly (Orji) had ended. Then we go back in time to track, through parallel Thanksgiving celebrations, poorly starred vacations and somehow unfortunate block parties, and various corners of a wonderfully lonely Los Angeles, their way away from each other and finally , his first steps back.
This is a fairly high level of ambition for the comedy arena: hooking up a one-season mega-arc about disaffection into a show that was built as a hanging between two friends wasn’t the easy choice. And yet, Rae and especially Orji sold the fights, with Issa’s increasingly desperate grips towards her friend, getting colder. Rae, over the past three seasons, showed her how Issa’s need and anxiety are essential to who she is and sometimes exhausting even to herself; Orji has demonstrated the ragged reasoning behind Molly’s urge to shut down emotionally when her needs are not being met. Both characters exist in a world that was not built for them as black women, but that is not the theme of the show, just a fact of life that they learned to process, first together and then separated. Their disentanglement was toward what the show had been building on their unlikely friendship story: it just made them more themselves, more confused, and more confident of Molly. This was television that derived from power due to the precision with which it relied on what had happened before.
What makes his Emmy nominations this year surprising, since “what had happened before” was not an award magnet. This year’s “Insecure” nominations coincide with a leap forward in quality and seem to serve as an acknowledgment of the previous three seasons of the underrated work it took to get there. They represent a growing wave of representation among Emmy nominees (with others from this year’s nominees, including Zendaya from “Euphoria” and Regina King from “Watchmen”, to name just two), and raise the question of what “Insecure” is. ” together, such an ambitious show for the first three years, he had to do to get inside. Perhaps the next black talent-led show as promising and finely forged as “Insecure” will meet the large-scale Emmys hit from its inception. What is most worth celebrating on an exciting day for one of the biggest shows of the year may be a power shift between a historically white show and a show performed by black talent: Emmys need shows like “Insecure” on the ballot to Recognizing what’s best on TV, but “Insecure” didn’t need the Emmys to be great.
