As spring turns to summer in Los Angeles, For Your Consideration season blooms: the jacarandas come in, bright purple, and so do the billboards pleading for Emmys, stretching from Hollywood to Beverly Hills, advertising beloved television dramas and shows you’ve never even heard of. (FYC, for example: Cocaine Godmother.) Some go big, others weird—one day in not long ago I found myself for the first time in the Arby’s on Sunset Boulevard, where the cast of FX’s Baskets had taken up temporary residence on a gray Tuesday morning. (“Can I ask you a question?” a weary Zach Galifianakis said to the assembled five or six journalists, after one too many questions about what item he most preferred on the menu. “How many questions will be about Arby’s?”)

Still others, like Shawn Levy, the executive producer of Netflix’s Stranger Things, simply wait for July 12, and then graciously accept the nomination. Or not. “I will tell you the truth,” Levy told me on Friday. “As recently as last Wednesday, I was saying to the brothers”—Matt and Ross Duffer, creators of Stranger Things—“it doesn’t seem like a safe assumption that we’re going to get a nomination.” In the end, they got 12.

Recently, Levy, a father of four daughters, had invited me to spend a morning with him as he ferried the two younger ones to school—time usually occupied with sing-a-longs to Broadway musicals, he told me. “I have seen Wicked 12 times,” Levy said, “because it's a daughter perennial.” In the backseat, Charlie, 11, and Coco, 7, agreed. Levy—curly-haired and still youthful at 49—piloted his Tesla through the yellow lights of Brentwood and Culver City. The girls graciously agreed to go without their usual soundtrack as their father reflected on his own recent encounters with For Your Consideration season. Before finding a second life of a producer—in addition to Stranger Things, his company, 21 Laps, made Arrival, The Spectacular Now, and Netflix’s recent Kodachrome—Levy was a director: family-oriented comedies like 2002’s Big Fat Liar and the three Night at the Museum movies, 2011’s Real Steel, and 2012’s Date Night, among others. His films have grossed over $2.4 billion, making him one of the more commercially successful, if not always critically acclaimed, directors in all of human history.

“I think I made seven or eight movies in a row that were hits and that were broad audience comedies, right?” he said. “And when you make certain choices for broad appeal, you're sacrificing some critical appeal. Now, the mixed or negative reviews—the bruised ego of that is more than assuaged by big opening weekends and the financial aspect of a box office hit. But then with things like Arrival and Stranger Things—Stranger Things is that ultimate unicorn that is both populist and pedigreed.”

Last year, the show’s debut season garnered 17 nominations—including one FYC-certified nod, even, for Shannon Purser, the actress who played the dear, departed Barb. “These were some of my first experiences with, like, Wow, when the critics like you? When they love you? God damn it feels good.”

His reverie was interrupted by Charlie, poking her head gamely forward from the backseat with a question for the reporter in her car: “In math class, we have to ask 15 minimum people for a survey,” she said, hopefully. “So, which activist are you most familiar with? Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Gandhi, Malala, or Albert Einstein?”