Golden Globes 2018: Why Alison Brie, Issa Rae, Gina Rodriguez, Kristen Bell, Drew Berrymore deserve Comedy Actress nod
Welcome to the 2018 Golden Globes CarterMatt preview series! With the popular awards show coming to NBC in January, what better time then now to start looking at possible nominees and favorites? This is the third straight year in which CarterMatt has had our own dedicated preview series, and our goal here is to help highlight the best of the best as voters within the Hollywood Foreign Press start to make their decisions.
On October 31, all official submissions were made to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and on November 24 ballots will begin going out for official nomination voting. The focus of this CarterMatt series is to help identify great shows and performers for the HFPA to consider. We’ll be sharing some of our personal picks in every TV-related category daily throughout the month of November at 1:00 p.m. Pacific time (4:00 p.m. Eastern), and from there, we’ll leave the voting for you to share some of your own favorites!
Voting Rules – Note that this is just for fun and for campaign purposes; you aren’t voting for the actual Golden Globes! Vote however often you want from now until November 30 at 12:00 p.m. Pacific time, when the polls close and will no longer be available. We will announce all of the poll winners at 1:00 p.m. Pacific on November 30, during the heart of campaign season, as a way to help get the word out on some shows and performers worthy of a nomination.
With all of that laid out, let’s get to today’s order of business: Discussing the CarterMatt picks for Actress in a Comedy Series. This is the final category that we have to showcase, so for the next two weeks it’s all about voting!
Kristen Bell, The Good Place (NBC) – It’s forking impossible, (to quote her own show) to have this list without Bell on it for making Eleanor so relatable and so entertaining to watch. She’s spirited, passionate, hilarious, and incredibly likable despite the fact that she’s done a number of terrible things … hence her actually being in the Bad Place rather than as the title suggests. In season 2 we’ve enjoyed her having a little bit more of a mission since it allows Bell to explore even more dimensions of this role.
Drew Berrymore, Santa Clarita Diet (Netflix) – There’s a big part of us interested in seeing this nomination happen just so that someone at the Globes can stand on the stage and try to explain her character — a suburban wife and mother who ends up a cannibal and becomes desperate to get more “food” for herself. It’s a crazy show and Berrymore commits to the crazy, making it just as funny and absurd as we could possibly want.
Alison Brie, GLOW (Netflix) – We love the meta-comedy that comes with a successful actress playing a struggling actress in Ruth Wilder, just as much as we love what she brings to the show itself. It’s a story that is surprisingly emotional at times and incredibly funny at others. Brie commits herself to the part physically — not easy, given the subject matter — and also emotionally by constructing a character with so many different struggles and dilemmas both inside the wrestling ring and out. Brie’s performance here is yet another reminder of how fantastic that Community cast really was for so many years.
Issa Rae, Insecure (HBO) – Rae is absolutely funny on this brilliantly character-driven show, allowing us to firmly experience all of the highs and lows of a woman like Issa. We cheer for her victories and get disappointed when things don’t go her way. While the show touches on tough subjects it rarely ever loses its comedic undercurrent and Rae is a huge part of the reason why. She makes us laugh so hard our belly aches. (With all of this said, that final scene imagining her future with Lawrence had to be one of the most heartbreaking moments of any show we’ve seen so far in 2017.)
Gina Rodriguez, Jane the Virgin (The CW) – There are many similarities between the Jane character in Issa in that they’re both young, hard-working women interested in finding a place in life. They’re also both incredibly endearing and get themselves into a fair share of awkward situations. Sometimes with shows that go on for many years it becomes harder to keep the show fresh; luckily, Rodriguez finds a way to do that.