Emmy voters are now halfway through final voting for this year’s awards ceremony, deciding which drama and comedy series, miniseries, talk series, variety series and specials, structured and unstructured reality programs, reality competition shows, animated series, documentaries and special shows, and game shows they like best.

And, oh yeah, they also pick their favorite TV movies, although they probably don’t have to think too long or hard about that category, which is now the least important at the Emmys.

It wasn’t always this way. The Outstanding Television Movie category has produced some notable TV movies, including Death of a Salesman starring Lee J. Cobb, the ultimate tearjerker Brian’s Song, the shocking Special Bulletin, and 21st century highlights The Gathering Storm, Recount, Grey Gardens, Behind the Candelabra, and even last year’s winner Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

Over the years, the category has often been lumped in with the Miniseries category, and there was a time when TV movies received more Emmy attention than miniseries. But that was a long time ago: perhaps around 1991, when the Movie and Miniseries categories were merged and the number of nominations for movies was four times as high as for miniseries.

Nowadays, however, the pressure is focused exclusively on miniseries, resulting in a statistic that is almost embarrassing: While the five programs nominated in the Outstanding Miniseries category received an average of almost 14 nominations each, the five nominated TV movies received a in total of five nominations.

The bottom line is that the total number of nominations in all categories for miniseries is exactly 100; for all TV movies it is 5. In other words: outside of the category that was entirely limited to TV movies, not a single TV movie was nominated.

This sad state of affairs comes a year after four of the five nominated films received multiple nominations: eight for “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” six for “Prey,” three for “Hocus Pocus 2” and two for “Fire Island.” This is in a year in which other contenders for best television movie were films directed by Oscar winners William Friedkin (“The Caine Story”), Brian Helgeland (“Finestkind”) and Peter Farrelly (“Ricky Stanicky”), as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael Cristofer (“The Great Lillian Hall”).

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the TV movie genre is dying out. It’s just that it’s been overwhelmed by bigger, bolder, more prestigious miniseries. And when movies and miniseries are lumped together in almost every category they’re eligible for, it’s become a problem for the movies, which just get buried by all those high-profile miniseries.

Admittedly, it’s difficult for a film to compete with the eight hours of “Fellow Travelers” or the seven-plus hours of “Fargo” and “Ripley”; even the three-hour, 55-minute running time of the seven episodes of “Baby Reindeer” is significantly longer than that of any two other nominated TV movies.

But let’s not write off a category that seems to have fallen on hard times. Before voting closes, and three weeks before the Emmy for Best TV Movie is awarded at the second Creative Arts Emmy ceremony on September 8, can we tip our hats to the five films that defied all expectations and at least received their individual Emmy nominations?

The list continues here.

“Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie”
Veteran producer and director Randy Zisk worked on nearly 100 episodes of the television series “Monk,” which was nominated for 18 Emmys between 2003 and 2010 and won eight, with three of those awards going to Tony Shalhoub for his portrayal of a San Francisco private investigator with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Peacock released the film in December 2023, and Shalhoub promptly received Critics Choice Award and SAG Award nominations.

“Quiz Lady”
Jessica Yu’s comedy premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and was well received. Audiences were amused when Awkwafina and Sandra Oh were cast against type, with Awkwafina playing a brilliant but reserved and antisocial game show fanatic and Oh her crazy and often out-of-control older sister. 20th Century Studios gave the film a film festival slot but released it as an original film on Hulu. The film won a Critics Choice Award and was nominated for a Producers Guild Award.

“Red, White & Royal Blue”
When the Emmy nominations were streamed live on YouTube on July 17, the comments section next to the video was filled with an astonishing flood of red, white and, er, royal blue heart emojis. This category wasn’t even announced live, but fans still made Matthew Lopez’s Prime Video film about the unlikely gay romance between a British prince and the son of the U.S. president (Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez, respectively) seem like the most popular film at this year’s Emmys. And unless Jerry Seinfeld is secretly working on Unfrosted 2: The Dawn of Frosting, it’s the only film that currently has a sequel in the works.

“Scoop”
In some ways in the tradition of recent movies like She Said and Spotlight, this Netflix drama follows the BBC team that landed the interview in which Prince Andrew sealed his fate by defending his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. With Gillian Anderson as an intrepid reporter and Rufus Sewell as a sinister Andrew (who knew Sewell could look so sloppy?), it would feel timely if we weren’t too distracted by US politics to pay much attention to British politics.

“Unfrozen”
And then there’s Netflix’s other contender, in which director Jerry Seinfeld gets every comedian he knows to tell an almost entirely made-up story about the origin of Pop Tarts. Critics weren’t impressed (this is the lowest-rated contender on Metacritic by a wide margin), but hey, Jon Hamm and John Slattery make a semi-amusing cameo, and Melissa McCarthy is the most unlikely brilliant scientist since twentysomething Denise Richards pretended to be a nuclear physicist in The World Is Not Enough.

A version of this story first appeared in the “Down to the Wire: Drama” issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.