This week, we’re presenting our Vulture TV Awards, honoring the best in television from the past calendar year. Vulture contributor Julie Klausner just kicked things off with an epic opening monologue, and now it’s time to give away the virtual hardware. Up first: Best Female Comedy Performer, as selected by Vulture television critic Matt Zoller Seitz.
The nominees are:
Mindy Kaling, The Mindy Project
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation
Amy Schumer, Inside Amy Schumer
Aisha Tyler, ArcherÂ
And the winner is …
- Best Comedy Performer, Female — Amy Schumer
- Best Comedy Performer, Male — Jon Benjamin
- Best Teen Show — The Fosters
- Best Child Actor — Maisie Williams
- Best Couple — The Americans’ Philip and Elizabeth
- Best Drama Performer, Male — Matthew Rhys
- Best Drama Performer, Female — Julianna Margulies
- Best Directed Scene — True Detective’s “Who Goes There†montage
- Best Episode — Hannibal season 2 finale
- Best TV Villain — Walter White
- Best Death — Click to find out [warning: spoilers]
- Best Network — FX
- Best Late-Night Moment — Colbert Report
- Best Dressed Characters — Scandal and others
- Best Dialogue — Sherlock
- Best Comedy Sketch — Inside Amy Schumer
- Best Plot Twist — House of Cards [warning: spoilers]
Winner: Amy Schumer
Inside Amy Schumer is a great sketch-comedy show that would be worth praising anyway, but its success will seem especially unexpected and sweet to anyone who watched Schumer endure the slings and arrows of frat-house-style hazing during Comedy Central’s Friar’s Club roasts. The toxic masculinity of stand-up culture was never more painfully obvious than when Schumer was at the podium or in the audience getting slagged by male peers. Their go-to insults were all “whore/slut/bitch†and variants of same. Her new show is a great response to that sort of unimaginative dude-bro hazing: a show that presents a startling range of female experience while turning the tables on the guys who tend to control how women are perceived in pop culture. But what makes Inside Amy Schumergenuinely delightful rather than tediously moralistic is Schumer’s lead performance, which has a bit of Carol Burnett’s fearlessness and versatility. Whether endless retaking selfies while sexting, bantering with a waiter at the male version of a Hooters-style restaurant, or interviewing random people on the street (when a dancer tells Schumer she once gave a 97-year old man a lap dance, she deadpans, “Walk me through thatâ€), she’s always exuberantly committed without tipping over into too-muchness. Her judgment is exquisite.