The British stage actor turned a small role as a socially awkward mayoral aide into television's most talked-about comedy performance of the year, beating five previous Emmy winners and nominees to the trophy.
Kate O'Flynn had never been nominated for an Emmy before Sunday night. Now she has one.
The British actor won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards for her turn as Patricia in Apple TV's "Widow's Bay," a horror-comedy about a cursed New England island that nobody expected to become this big a deal a year ago.
O'Flynn beat a stacked field to get there. Her own co-star Dale Dickey was in the running. So were "Hacks" veterans Hannah Einbinder and Meg Stalter, "Abbott Elementary's" Janelle James, Michelle Pfeiffer for "Margo's Got Money Troubles," and Jessica Williams for "Shrinking." That's a category with a Pfeiffer in it and O'Flynn still walked away with the statue.
Her speech ran warm and unpolished, the way first-time winners tend to go. "Thank you so much. Oh wow, gosh!" she said, before thanking the fictional town itself. "I want to thank all the residents of Widow's Bay, in front of and behind the camera. You're amazing. This is the role of a lifetime." She singled out creator Katie Dippold for casting her as, in O'Flynn's words, "a saucy broad like Patricia," thanked Apple TV for greenlighting the show, and closed by dedicating the win to her husband and daughter, calling the latter "another saucy broad in the making." Her last line got the room laughing: "This is for all the Patricias out there!"
On screen, Patricia is Mayor Tom Loftis's chief assistant, played by Matthew Rhys, a character who starts out as comic relief and ends up carrying half the show's mystery on her shoulders. The series follows Tom trying to rebrand his dying island town as a tourist draw, ignoring generations of local warnings that the place is cursed. As things get stranger, Patricia becomes one of the only people trying to figure out what's actually going on, and the character has quietly become the performance critics point to when they talk about the show's first season.
That first season did not need much time to make its case to Emmy voters. "Widow's Bay" picked up 19 nominations total, including Outstanding Comedy Series and acting nods for Rhys, O'Flynn, Dickey and Stephen Root, and it arrived at Sunday's ceremony having already banked eight wins at the earlier Creative Arts Emmys, among them a guest actress trophy for Betty Gilpin. For a show that hadn't even wrapped its debut season by the nominations cutoff, that's an unusually loud entrance.
"Hacks," wrapping its fifth and final season, matched "Widow's Bay" with seven major nominations but pulled ahead on the count with 24 nods to the newcomer's 19. Whether "Widow's Bay" turns into the kind of show that shows up at these ceremonies every year, the way "Hacks" just did for the last time, is the question Apple TV will be hoping gets answered with a second season order.
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