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Considerations
Covering the annual film industry awards races, with sharp commentary on the pictures, the players, the money and the spectacle. by Tyler Coates
Ready or Not, the Emmys Are Coming
Hacks To quote Schitt’s Creek’s Moira Rose: My favorite season? Awards. And for some of us, it’s a year-round venture.
Weeks before the Academy Awards took place on March 15, I began tracking the dozens of shows that would soon be campaigning for Emmys. The Emmys take place each year in September, but like its cinematic counterpart, the preparation begins many months earlier. After all, Oscar futures are currently being debated as Cannes rolls into its second week. Similarly, the Emmy luncheons, billboards, screenings, and Q&As have been in the works for a long time already.
But we’re now in the thick of it. May is essentially Oscar-season December for television, with (mostly) the streamers rushing out their shows ahead of the Emmys’ May 31 eligibility deadline. (The cable and broadcast networks, releasing their episodes weekly throughout the traditional fall-to-spring season, planned ahead.) If the last few months have felt particularly TV-heavy, that’s why; just as the consensus dictates that fall film releases are a boon for Oscar consideration, the marketing and PR teams working on this spring’s numerous television shows hope that a similar recency bias will help their projects cut through the crowded field of contenders.
And it is crowded. There are a smidge fewer shows on television now thanks to the Streaming Wars, which did not wrap up with any winners but rather a lot of corporate consolidation in Hollywood. The Emmy race is, essentially, a competition between a few legacy studios in Disney (which owns ABC, Fox, FX, and Hulu), Paramount (CBS, Paramount+, Showtime), Warner Bros. Discovery (HBO and HBO Max) and Universal (Bravo, NBC, Peacock)—plus their streaming counterparts in Apple TV, Netflix, and Prime Video. So, a lot of familiar faces from Oscar season.
But the nominations themselves are very different. First, obviously, is the number of contenders—not just the shows, but the actors, too. While the Oscars only nominate five films in each category (save for best picture, which gets ten noms), the Emmys’ categories are much bigger as the number of nominees are determined by the number of submitted entries. Thus, we’ll get eight nominated shows in the comedy and drama categories, and five in limited/anthology series; the numbers in the acting categories fluctuate by year, but there are typically more supporting nominees than leads. It’s all a lot of math that I did not sign up for when I decided to pay attention to all of this, but that’s how you end up with records like The Bear and The Studio tied for the most comedy series nominations in a single year (with 23 nods each) and Game of Thrones holding the same record for a drama series (32 nods. In one year!).
Also, there are hundreds of shows. More than any human could feasibly watch! And unlike the Oscars, which awards a yearly reset of new films and the occasional sequel, the Emmys will feature debut seasons of TV competing with shows that have been on for years. Also unlike Oscar season: there are no real precursors, as all of the professional guilds hand out their TV awards months after the Emmys at the same shows as their film awards. That basically means anything that premiered on television in 2025—all the brand-new shows publicists hope are top-of-mind—are going into an awards race empty-handed. That makes predicting the Emmy outcomes pretty impossible if you want to go by the standards my fellow prognosticators use during the Oscar race.
And yet, there are some predictable winners this year—that’s the other benefit of a too-crowded field. Is there a more popular drama than HBO Max’s The Pitt, which just wrapped its wildly popular second season and will likely scoop up a second consecutive Emmy for best drama series? The medical drama, with new episodes premiering weekly, is the closest we have to a water cooler show (it has created fiery social media discourse among its rabid fans). It has competition in previous nominees like Fallout (Prime Video), The Morning Show (Apple), Paradise (Hulu), and Stranger Things (Netflix), plus new series Pluribus (Apple) and Task (HBO). But when there’s a juggernaut like The Pitt leading the race, landing one of the seven other slots is still an accomplishment. (To quote a veteran publicist I’ve worked with over the years: “The nomination is the win.”)
Similarly, the comedy race could see previous winner Hacks (HBO Max) pick up its second series win for its final season (plus a fifth consecutive Emmy for lead actress Jean Smart); it certainly has the edge as a backstage comedy that voters will recognize as realistic (and it has a clear path as last year’s winner, The Studio, is in between seasons). Previous winner The Bear (FX) will likely be among the nominees, although it may have worn out its welcome (Hacks infamously broke its Emmy-winning streak in 2024). ABC’s Abbott Elementary still has a lot of love behind it (and making it to five seasons is a feat, considering the network sitcom is an endangered species), as do Netflix’s Nobody Wants This and Apple’s Shrinking, which both earned noms for their previous seasons. Apple’s Margot’s Got Money Troubles is the strongest of the debut series, and HBO’s The Comeback could squeeze in, too—despite previous nominations in 2006 and 2015 (including two for star Lisa Kudrow), the beloved Hollywood satire has never landed a nom for comedy series.
The limited/anthology series category is always a strange one, and thus my favorite. Like the Oscars, the nominees are mostly new apart from subsequent seasons of anthology series, the sequels of the TV world. And this year has plenty of buzzy shows about relationship woes, including Beef (Netflix), DTF St. Louis (HBO), and Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette (FX). There’s also a new Richard Gad series in HBO’s Half Man, which may be even more harrowing than his Emmy-winning 2024 series Baby Reindeer; a fresh adaptation of Lord of the Flies from Netflix, whose sweep with Adolescence last year proves the streamer knows how to sell a tale of fucked-up British boys; and a half-hour dark comedy in Prime Video’s Bait, in which Riz Ahmed plays a very Riz Ahmed-esque actor in London in the running to play the next James Bond.
In short, there’s too much TV to even write about—and there will be too many Emmy contenders to spotlight in this space. Over the next few weeks of this Considerations newsletter for the TV set, I’m interested in two things: highlighting some of the people making all of this TV who may not necessarily make the headlines, and uncovering the trends that exist among their different shows—from blending comedy and genre, tackling the nuances (and existential threats) of AI, and how the political chaos of our current time has impacted the stories we see being told on television. Follow along with me over the next few months as we try to organize chaos, sifting through the shows that Emmy voters will judge as the year’s best.
