News and views: Robert Bianco on the Emmy races

If Emmy is lucky, August's awards will fix some of the mess created by July's nominations.

As you'll see Monday when they air on NBC (8 ET/5 PT), the Emmys are even more of a mess than usual. An influx of original programming from a host of new sources has made the races ever more competitive — and encouraged some of the competitors to obviously and egregiously bend the rules, shopping around for categories they think they have the best chance to win.

So Netflix calls Orange Is the New Black a comedy, to keep it out of the way of the company's House of Cards, and Showtime converts Shameless into a comedy, in hopes it will fare better there than it did as a drama last year. HBO calls the eight-episode run of True Detective a series, even though neither the actors, characters or story will continue, and the final five episodes of Treme a miniseries, even though all those elements carried over from the three seasons before.

This, as they say, is what happens when you allow the inmates to run — and fund — the asylum. So it would be nice if, next year, the powers that be stepped up and exercised a bit of power, not to mention judgment.

What we're looking for is consistency. If True Detective was a series, then so were Fargo and American Horror Story, both of which are in the miniseries category. If Treme was a miniseries, than so was the final run of Breaking Bad.

For now, however, all the members can do is to avoid rewarding the worst examples of Emmy gamesmanship. They can't, alas, write in shows that should have been nominated in the drama category, such as The Good Wife, The Americans and Masters of Sex, but they can at least stop True Detective from moving past nominee to winner.

Will they? The truth is, it's almost impossible to say, because in typically confusing Emmy fashion, the people who chose those winners are not the same people who chose the nominees.

All Academy members are eligible to cast nominating ballots in the Best Drama category. But if they want to help pick the winner, they have to be chosen to serve on the judging panel — and they're not eligible if they've judged that category more than two years in a row.

They also have to agree to watch the submitted episodes, which they may indeed do, even though they're now doing so at home in private rather than in public as a group. But if you think they base their decisions only on those episodes, without any influence from friendships, working relationships, fame, fandom, or other biases, well, you have a different understanding of human nature than I do.

Let's just say the process is messy, and leave it at that.