yet another cheap attempt to raise this blog's hit count

I'm looking at a list of eleven actresses, and it's an impressive bunch, to say the least. Here are ten of the eleven, with brief comments:

Jane Alexander. Nominated for four Oscars, eight Emmys (two wins), and seven Tonys (one win).
Candice Bergen. Five-time Emmy winner, two-time Golden Globe winner.
Rose Byrne. Young Australian actress, had a bit part in one of the Star Wars movies, has won acting awards from the Australian Film Institute and the Venice Film Festival.
Jill Clayburgh. Two Best Actress Oscar nominations, two Emmy nominations, one Best Actress win at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sharon Gless. Two Emmys, two Golden Globes.
Rachel Griffiths. Another Australian actress, with three Emmy nominations and one Oscar nomination, one Golden Glove win, two Screen Actors Guilds awards, and a few Australian awards thrown in for good measure.
S. Epatha Merkerson. Winner of a Golden Globe, two Obies, an Emmy, a Screen Actors Guild Award ... and most important, she was Reba the Mail Lady on Pee-wee's Playhouse.
Sandra Oh. Three Screen Actors Guild awards, three Emmy nominations, and a Golden Globe award.
Dianne Wiest. Two-time Oscar winner, Emmy winner, Golden Globe winner, Screen Actors Guild award winner ... heck, she has two American Comedy Awards!
Chandra Wilson. Two-time Screen Actors Guild award winner, two Emmy nominations.

So, who are these women? They are ten of the eleven semifinalists for the 2008 Emmy for Best Supporting Drama Actress. The Emmys are releasing these lists in bits and pieces, for some unknown reason. Suffice to say that there are a lot of heavyweight actresses on this list, no matter which ones make the final cut.

And who is the eleventh woman on the list? I'd call her a newcomer but she's older than Rose Byrne. She has won a previous award, well-deserved in my opinion, but in truth it was a sci-fi website award for a single guest appearance on a now-canceled television show. And, oh yeah ... I have an autographed glossy of her. And her name regularly turns up amongst the top search queries that lead people to this site. In fact, for the month of June, her name was the #1 search query for this site that didn't include the word "rubio." She was also #3, #11, and #17, all featuring variants of her name. Three of those four entries included reference to nudity, all the more remarkable in that she has never appeared fully nude in any production of which I'm aware.

Yes, it's true: Christina Hendricks is in the running for an Emmy for her work in Mad Men. Thank the lord not all women are sticks. Here she is in a scene with Elisabeth Moss, well-known to West Wing fans ... Moss is a semifinalist in the Best Actress category:

Like pretty much everyone in the cast, Moss is terrific. Mad Men is a "guy show" in many ways, but it's also something like Deadwood in that its setting, at the beginning of great change, allows for fascinating narratives. Deadwood showed emergent capitalism in all its rawness. Mad Men is about people on the edge between what we call the 50s and what we call the 60s, and this is finely detailed in three of the major female roles. Betty, wife of the lead male character (and nicely underplayed by January Jones) is the housewife Friedan wrote about. Moss's Peggy, who begins as a pool secretary but whose writing skills give her access to the previously all-male copywriter jobs, is the New Woman. And Hendricks's Joan? She's caught in the middle. She uses her sexuality to maneuver her way through the workplace ... she's intelligent, she could do more with her life, but despite her smarts she envies Peggy for those skills that aren't reliant on a great body. Envies her, but doesn't imitate her ... Joan was successful in the male-dominated world, but as women become more powerful up front, Joan's skills are less necessary. Her time is passing. What makes Hendricks worthy of an Emmy nomination is the way she conveys all of this largely through knowing glances and subtle line readings. Hendricks lets us know that Joan is aware of how the world is changing, but also that she doesn't know how to adapt. In this, she is like most of the male characters, raised in a time when men ruled, about to get slapped with the new gender reality. Peggy will likely be successful in that new reality ... Betty might make it if she doesn't go crazy first. But Joan's options are limited, and Hendricks manages to get that across even as she plays an outwardly confident woman. That she also gets my vote as hottest women on television doesn't hurt, of course.

(And yes, the McLuhan reference is anachronistic.)