Tadanobu Asano takes lead in Best Supporting Actor odds: ‘Shōgun’ now predicted to go 6-for-6 on Emmy night

“Shōgun” had a record-breaking weekend at the Creative Arts Emmys, claiming 14 trophies. That’s more than any program has ever won in a single season, beating the record set in 2008 by the limited series “John Adams.” So it almost goes without saying that the series is expected to do well for itself at the Primetime Emmy telecast on September 15 as well. In fact, Tadanobu Asano just moved from second place to first place in the race for Best Drama Supporting Actor, so now we’re predicting a clean sweep for the historical drama.

The previous front-runner was Billy Crudup (“The Morning Show”), who won for his role as network exec Cory Ellison in 2020. Up until this year that was the only Emmy win for the Apple TV+ flagship series, until this year it claimed contemporary makeup and contemporary hairstyling honors. This was the biggest year ever for the show in terms of nominations: 16 total, including its first-ever bid for Best Drama Series. So it seemed as though Crudup was ripe for a repeat.

That was before “Shōgun” had its historic Creative Arts haul. It claimed Best Drama Guest Actor for Nestor Carbonell, showing support from the actors branch of the television academy. And the show also proved unbeatable almost everywhere else it went, only losing two awards for music composition and main title theme music. That prompted a lot of Emmy pundits, myself included, to predict “Shōgun” across all of its upcoming telecast categories, which meant switching to Asano if we weren’t predicting him already.

Now betting on Asano to win are nine Expert journalists, compared to five who say Crudup is still out front. Also forecasting him are 10 out of 11 Gold Derby Editors. There are two elite groups still favoring Crudup, though — our Top 24 Users and our All-Star Top 24 — but we’ll see if any of them make the switch before Sunday night. As of this writing Asano and Crudup both get 5/1 odds of winning, with Asano in the lead by a hair.

That means “Shōgun” is now the front-runner in all six of its categories, also including Best Drama Series, Best Drama Actor (Hiroyuki Sanada), Best Drama Actress (Anna Sawai), Best Drama Writing (“Crimson Sky”) and Best Drama Directing (“Crimson Sky”). If our latest odds are right, that’ll bring the show’s total to an almost unimaginable 20 Emmys for the year, a record that won’t soon be broken — unless “Shōgun” itself breaks it when it returns for season two.