Tom Hollander – “The Night Manager”
Susanne Bier’s John le Carré-based miniseries “The Night Manager” was billed as a head-to-head between two British acting heavyweights, Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston, but while no one was looking, Tom Hollander snuck in and stole the show away. The British actor, best known for his show “Rev” and for playing the villain in the “Pirates Of The Caribbean” sequels, plays Lance Corkoran, a right-hand man of Laurie’s arms dealer Richard Roper who finds himself being pushed out in the cold as Hiddleston’s infiltrator gets closer and closer to the inner circle. Hollander plays him as a creature of pure spite — actually, that’s not quite true: He’s spite and envy and lust (mostly for Hiddleston, perhaps understandably) wrapped up into a bile-spewing package that might be the most dangerous thing that our hero faces. Hiddleston’s clearly having the most fun of anyone on screen, and the show loses a little something once he departs it.
Riley Keough – “The Girlfriend Experience”
As far as TV experiments go this year, the idea of a sex worker-themed drama series based on one of Steven Soderbergh’s least successful films, airing on softcore home Starz, seemed like one of the ones doomed to fail. But “The Girlfriend Experience” is our favorite TV show of the year so far, one dominated by a mighty, mighty performance by Riley Keough. Elvis’ grand-daughter has been on a hell of a run, with “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “American Honey” bookending this, but her Christine, a bright young woman who begins working as an escort to help fund her internship, is her most memorable creation: understated, ever-seeking, led by thought rather than emotion, keeping the audience at just enough of a distance while still willing them to follow. It’s an incredibly bold, mature performance that few performers would have dared to try and pull off — that Keough does it so beautifully, putting Christine in the pantheon of anti-heroes alongside Tony Soprano and Walter White, is an extraordinary feat.
T.J. Miller – “Silicon Valley”
Across its three seasons to date, “Silicon Valley” has grown exponentially, from the enjoyable tech-themed “Office Space” riff it initially seemed to be to a show as gripping as any drama and as funny as any comedy. With it, its performances have grown too, and none so much as T.J. Miller as Erlich Bachman, the arrogant ‘incubator’ who’s been hosting the development of Pied Piper. Arrogant, already wealthy thanks to his earlier start-up, and bullying, Erlich was funny, but you didn’t care for him. But across the third season, as Thomas Middleditch’s Richard was (mostly) in the ascendant, Erlich crashed and burned, losing at least a couple of fortunes and, worst of all, losing his reputation. We weren’t sure if Miller had the range in him, but he’s been consistently surprising all season, and his genuine hurt and fury when Richard betrayed him — as he saw it, anyway — made you feel for him in a way that would have been hard to imagine at the start of the first season.
Krysten Ritter – “Jessica Jones”
Since first coming to people’s attention with spiky best-friend roles in rom-coms and as the doomed Jane on “Breaking Bad,” Krysten Ritter has been in search of a role worthy of her talents, mostly in vain. But it finally arrived with Netflix and Marvel’s “Jessica Jones.” An indestructible, heavy-drinking superhero-turned-private eye whose worst enemy would be herself if she didn’t already have a nemesis in the form of mind-controller Kilgrave (David Tennant, just as good as Ritter), she’s spiky, cynical and self-loathing, and in lesser hands would be kind of an unpalatable watch. But Ritter’s gift is in taking her characters right to the edge of unlikability and then showing how wounded and vulnerable they are. Even when the show doesn’t work — as good as it can be, it doesn’t remotely have enough story for its 13 episodes — Ritter pulls it along by its bootstraps by sheer force.
Amirah Vann – “Underground”
Between “UnREAL,” “The Girlfriend Experience” and a few others, this was the show where we finally got the female equivalents to the male anti-heroes that have dominated prestige cable drama, but few of those characters or performances were as compelling as Amirah Vann on “Underground.” WGN America’s drama about a group of slaves planning their escape on the underground railroad is one of the best shows that you’re not watching, and has a strong cast across the board, but Vann, a relative newcomer with few major credits beyond the series, is the obvious standout as its most complex figure, Ernestine, the head house slave on the plantation. Ernestine is a survivor, and the show never shies from the difficult choices that a survivor has to make, from sleeping with the plantation owner (Reed Diamond) to killing the mother of an escapee to stop them ratting out her own children. It’s an instantly indelible character, and a performance that should put Vann highly in demand even if (as is fairly likely) the show gets ignored by the Emmys.