Get ready for TV’s coma season, here come the annual awards and streaming columnist NICK OVERALL has a shot at making sense of it all…

PREACHY speeches, flat jokes and ceremonies long enough to put viewers into a coma: it’s TV-award season again. If anything, they can certainly give audiences some great new stuff to watch. 

Here’s a wrap up of what’s got the gong noms from the streaming world that can be watched right now. 

Netflix has nominations falling out of its pockets with royal rumble drama “The Crown”, the Gary Oldman-led “Mank” and the show that’s made chess cool again, “The Queen’s Gambit”.

Netflix once again has shown its ability to tick the boxes of almost every type of viewer, whether they want hard hitting historical drama or pithy modern entertainment. The platform continues to stay on top because it continues to back every horse in the race.

That aside, here’s a few slightly more obscure picks of the nominations.

Take two of the most well-liked modern comedy actors, put them together as a dysfunctional couple and throw in a Bill Murray “Groundhog Day”-style time loop, and the result is “Palm Springs”, nominated for Best Comedy Film.

Those two actors I speak of are Cristin Milioti, known from “How I Met Your Mother” (on Netflix) and Andy Samberg, known from “Brooklyn Nine Nine” (yes, also on Netflix). The latter also received a nomination for his performance in the film.

It’s a neat little burst of entertainment that fully commits to its quirky premise and in doing so has a more emotionally intelligent payoff than one might first expect.

Speaking of Bill Murray, he’s also nominated for Best Lead in a Comedy Film for “On the Rocks”, a story about the bond between parents and aged children with a charming New York backdrop, available on Apple TV+.

It’s directed by Sofia Coppola, now a fully fledged filmmaker herself after beginning her career acting in another award-winning little film of her father’s: “The Godfather” (Binge).

While we’re on directors, Regina King has been nominated as one of the best of them in 2020 for her debut film “One Night in Miami…”.

A fascinating blend of history and fiction, it sees four actors playing younger versions of boxer Muhammad Ali, social activist Malcom X, American football star Jim Brown and singer Sam Cooke.

Together, they contend with the responsibility of being successful black men during the civil rights movement in what is a fantastic achievement for a first-time filmmaker. It can be streamed on Amazon Prime Video.

Bob Odenkirk, for the fourth time now, got a nomination for his work in “Better Call Saul”, the prequel series to television icon “Breaking Bad”. Odenkirk’s performance represents some of the finest modern acting out there, in a show that’s narrative nuance is unrivalled. Both shows can be found on Stan.

What about the big streaming gong though? That’d be the award for Best Television Drama. These are the most binge-worthy of the binge-worthy, the ones everyone’s talking about.

Netflix takes out three of the five noms with “The Crown”, “Ozark”, and “Ratched”. Production company HBO (whose programs are streamed through Binge) picks up one with “Lovecraft Country” and, of course, the king of streaming gets a nod: Disney Plus’ “The Mandalorian”.

It’s too tight to call a winner, but whatever show does go home with the award sets a strong precedent for the future of the streaming competition. 

It was also fantastic to see the highly underrated show “The Great” nominated as Best Comedy TV. It’s a brutally hilarious retelling of Russian empress Catherine the Great’s rise to power. 

An advocate of the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, the show dramatises how Catherine famously injected herself with what was one of the first-ever vaccines in history, to fight a smallpox epidemic. 

At the time she was considered by much of the world to be bonkers for taking a vaccine she didn’t know about, but wait, hold on a second…