Golden Globes 2018: Why The Sinner, The White Princess, Feud: Bette & Joan deserve Limited Series nods
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 the first order of business today: Discussing the CarterMatt picks for Limited Series / TV Movie. (Technically, all of our choices are limited series — hence the emphasis on that in the title.)
Big Little Lies (HBO) – What happens when a horrible secret comes out? Can a community band together against what happened? What does it mean to be a parent, a spouse, or an individual in America these days? These themes were all tackled in David E. Kelley’s incredible slow-burn drama based on the Liane Moriarty book. While of course Reese Witherspoon, Alexander Skarsgard, and Nicole Kidman have generated tremendous awards-show buzz, let’s not forget about Laura Dern or Shailene Woodley while we’re at it.
Feud: Bette & Joan (FX) – The moment you looked at the call sheet on this show you knew it was going to be great — how could it not be with Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Kathy Bates, and Alfred Molina? Yet, the end result was poignant and actually offered up insight on why Joan Crawford suffered despite her success and her (at-times) unfavorable attitude. It even generated a surprising amount of sympathy. This was a beautifully-constructed series about a painful subject: The downfall of Hollywood celebrity.
The Sinner (USA) – One of the best mysteries of the year. So long as you didn’t read the source material in advance you were likely perplexed by why Cora Tannetti would kill Frankie Belmont the entirety of its run. Jessica Biel and Bill Pullman anchored the series with some of their best performances ever and it was perfectly-paced to give you a few answers every week, while still saving something for the future.
The White Princess (Starz) – It was arresting, violent, but also absolutely sensational. It was the story before The Tudors, and while not canon to that series by any means (we’re talking about separate networks) the two shows touched on similar themes including what it means to be Royal and the value of trust and allegiance in the medieval era.
The Young Pope (HBO) – Take a way all of the memes over the show’s title and you were left with a thought-provoking and visually stunning series about judgment, the state of the church, and how we all choose to perceive religion in the modern day. Because of its placement early in the year the Jude Law – Diane Keaton series did not receive enough attention for its quality and we are hoping that the Golden Globes will take notice of it.