Game of Thrones, Justified, Parks and Recreation Lead TCA Awards Nominees

It’s television award time! The Emmy’s are still a ways away, but in the mean time we have the Television Critics Association awards, or the TCAs. Leading in nominations with four apiece are HBO’s Game of Thrones, FX’s Justified, and NBC’s Parks and Recreation.

Now to break those down. Game of Thrones has had the production value of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but cranked up a notch. It’s gory, vulgar, and fun to watch. The characters and their motives are so intricate and deep, yet you can still get pulled in to this world. Check out our weekly reviews of the episodes by our own Elisabeth Rappe, our weekly podcast covering the show, and our combo reread of the novels by George R.R. Martin that the show is adapted from (by a series newbie and a series vet). Parks and Recreation jumped into a great start for it’s third season. The cast brought their A game, including new comers Rob Lowe and Adam Scott. Bringing in new characters is tricky, but Parks and Rec did it with class and made us fall in love with them immediately. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with Justified enough to comment on it, except to say if it’s been nominated for Program of the Year it must be doing something right.

There were two big differences from last years awards that had me beside myself with glee (wait for it…). The first was that Glee (there it is!) didn’t get a single nomination, whereas last year it won best program. I think this goes to show it suffered a significant loss in quality in its second season. The second was Community landing two nominations (Individual Achievement in Comedy – Danny Pudi, Outstanding Achievement in Comedy) after being snubbed last year. If you watch Community you’d have seen the show really rise to the occasion in its second season, taking lots of risks with only a few missteps.

You can check out the rest of the nominations at TV Line.