Chandra Wilson has Katherine Heigl's ungrateful back

Last month, Katherine Heigl, who won an Emmy for her work last year on "Grey's Anatomy," issued a curious statement saying, in effect, she wasn't going to put herself up for nomination again this year because, well, the material her writers gave her this year kind of stank. And while that may in fact be true (but certainly, she wasn't the only one singled out for that kind of material on that show this season), it seemed a bit, well, impolitic to point it out to the entire world.

But not according to her co-star Chandra Wilson, who yesterday at TV Press Tour tried to tamp down the flames of outrage circling her colleague:

"All actors have to do the exact same thing every single year," Wilson explained. "We have to decide, you know, 'How do I submit and, if I submit, which clip to submit?' And I think the public at large doesn't understand that it's not about your body of work or it's not about the season. It's about the show that you submit.

So -- and especially when you're dealing with drama categories, okay? So it needs to be high drama, or it needs to be high comedy. So it can't really be kind of something in the middle. You can have a great seasonal arc, but if you don't have, like, that show that's, like, your show and you were breaking out in tears, well, then, that's not the right thing for the category. So we all have to do that every single time.

"Every single time we put our money up for our submission, that's the thing that we have to do. So it was amazing to me the way it kind of got blown out of proportion because if you asked every single actor on every single show, they'll tell you the exact same thing. Some years you submit. Some years you don't."

That very diplomatic explanation might put Wilson in the running for some kind of award. At the very least, Heigl owes her one of the angel's wings off her trophy from last year.