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And eight more fascinating findings unearthed from the hundreds of 2026 Emmy nominations. (From left: Tim Robinson in The Chair Company, Colman Domingo in The Four Seasons, Carey Mulligan in Beef.)
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: HBO, Netflix
Every year, the Emmy nominations land with a thud: dozens of categories, hundreds of nominees, far too many narratives to cover at once. But now that the dust has settled, the Widow’s Bay bomb has dropped, The Pitt’s acting nominees have been accounted for, and the Hacks farewell tour is officially booked, it’s time for the real fun to begin, Let’s dig through the mountain of TV Academy PDFs to find the low-simmering story lines, unusual superlatives, and odd record breakers that make following such an ungainly awards apparatus so much fun.
Once all the Emmy nominations were tallied last week, the HBO–HBO Max combo came out on top with 122, followed by Netflix with 111 and Apple TV with 87. But if you zero in on the major categories (the ones presented on the main Emmys telecast), Apple jumps to second place, outpacing Netflix 29 to 26. And of those 26 major Netflix nominations, 19 are concentrated in the Limited/Anthology Series categories, where Beef, The Beast in Me, Black Rabbit, Death by Lightning, and Monster: The Ed Gein Story all scored multiple nods. For the second straight year, Netflix’s only series nominations in Comedy and Drama were Nobody Wants This and The Diplomat, respectively, with Nobody Wants This pulling in only two nominations (for Music Supervision, too).
You can look at this two ways: First, Netflix is a powerhouse when it comes to limited series. Since getting its first Outstanding Limited Series nomination for Godless in 2018, Netflix has been nominated 15 times in that category, well ahead of the totals for HBO (nine), FX (seven), and Hulu (four) in that same time period. Netflix is the only platform to have had at least one Limited Series nominee every year since 2018, it’s had multiple nominees in five of those nine years, and it’s won four times in the last five years.
The second way to look at it is that Netflix is increasingly only an Emmy player in the Limited Series categories. Of those 26 major-category nominations, 18 came from its limited series: Beef, The Beast in Me, Black Rabbit, Death by Lightning, and Monster: The Ed Gein Story. (The 19th was for Sally Field in Remarkably Bright Creatures, a TV movie.) In the Creative Arts categories, Netflix’s limited series picked up another 26 nominations, meaning 44 of Netflix’s 111 total nominations — about 40 percent — come from limited series. Compare that to the 34 nominations (31 percent) in comedy and drama series combined. Of those series, only The Diplomat (six nominations) and Nobody Wants This (two nominations) were recognized in major categories. The bulk of Netflix’s comedy and drama nominations come from strong craft-category tallies of Stranger Things (seven), Wednesday (six), and Bridgerton (four). Stranger Things has ended. Nobody Wants This is trending downward. Continuing shows like The Night Agent, The Lincoln Lawyer, The Witcher, A Man on the Inside, Running Point, and Big Mistakes have never been Emmy players in the first place and were shut out again this year.
Now, look at the limited series Netflix has lined up for next Emmy year: the highly anticipated East of Eden adaptation starring Florence Pugh; the Sam Bankman-Fried crypto-scam series The Altruists; the Pride and Prejudice adaptation starring Emma Corrin, Jack Lowden, and Olivia Colman; a new season of Monster about the Lizzy Borden killings starring Rebecca Hall and Vicky Krieps; the JonBenet Ramsey limited series starring Melissa McCarthy and Clive Owen; the teen psychodrama The Body from Under the Bridge producer Quinn Shephard; adaptations of the novels My Brilliant Career and Unaccustomed Earth. There’s every reason to believe Netflix will again be a force to reckon with in next year’s Limited Series categories. Yes, it looks like Apple has usurped Netflix’s place at the center of the TV Zeitgeist, but if Netflix chooses to lean in to what’s been working for it, it’s Emmy fortunes should stay afloat.
For only the third time in the last ten years, seven of this year’s acting nominees in the lead, supporting, and guest designations are their show’s single Emmy nominee:
• Wonder Man’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen
• Bait’s Riz Ahmed
• Rooster’s Steve Carell
• The Morning Show’s Billy Crudup
• The Four Seasons’s Colman Domingo
• Half Man’s Richard Gadd
• The Testaments’s Chase Infiniti
Five of these seven shows are new, with Bait and Half Man as limited series not set to return. Whether the nominations for Abdul-Mateen, Carell, and Infiniti will serve as a beachhead for further Emmy success for Wonder Man, Rooster, and The Testaments in the years ahead is an open question. That kind of thing has happened before, most recently when Keri Russell was The Diplomat’s lone nomination for its first season in 2023. Two years later, it’s a seven-time nominee with back-to-back placements in Outstanding Drama.
Domingo’s nomination for The Four Seasons marks the second year in a row that he’s that show’s single nomination. Don Cheadle was the last actor to pull that off when he was Black Monday’s only nominee in both 2019 and 2020.
Finally, Billy Crudup’s fourth nomination in four tries for The Morning Show (he won in 2020 and 2024) is the only nomination for the show’s fourth season. That’s down from 16 nominations for season three. The Emmys haven’t seen a season-to-season drop like that since 2023, when it happened to three shows: The Mandalorian (down from 24 nominations in 2021 to nine in 2023), The Crown (down from 24 nominations in 2021 to six in 2023), and The Handmaid’s Tale (down from 21 nominations in 2021 to only one in 2023).
More than anything, these lone nominations show how much star power matters when it comes to Emmy voting. Chase Infiniti’s heat coming off One Battle After Another was enough to power her campaign more strongly than her show’s. Abdul-Mateen, Carell, Crudup, and Domingo are past Emmy winners. Richard Gadd’s sweep for Baby Reindeer retained some goodwill even if the voters were less enamored of Half Man. Riz Ahmed is an Oscar nominee and Emmy winner (for The Night Of; he was also nominated for Girls). If the quickest path to getting an Emmy nomination is to be on a show voters love, the second-quickest path is to be someone they already love.
Reminder: The nominations for the Series categories are voted on by the entire academy; the other categories are voted on by the individual branches. This makes for some fascinating choices in the writing and directing categories; amid the expected double nods for Series nominees The Pitt, Pluribus, Abbott Elementary, and Hacks were a few outliers.
In the Comedy category, HBO’s The Chair Company pulled in a writing nomination for series creators Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, while Andrew DeYoung scored a Best Director nomination. The series, which follows a minor workplace embarrassment that leads Robinson’s character to investigate a wide-ranging conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, was critically embraced when it premiered in the fall. Given Robinson and Kanin’s penchant for pressing on the discomfort and desperation of their characters, it was never going to be a show with broad appeal, but the writers and directors, sickos that they are, were clearly impressed by the show’s unhinged, paranoid charms and responded with their votes.
In the Drama categories, Brad Ingelsby’s feel-bad crime drama Task was predicted by many to be an Outstanding Drama Series nominee, but it narrowly missed in favor of fellow first-year HBO show A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and surprise nominee Your Friends and Neighbors. But the writers and directors showed themselves to be big fans of Task’s moral compromises and bleak outlook on desperate communities. Ingelsby was nominated for writing the season finale, while Salli Richardson-Whitfield picked up her second of two nominations in the directing category, having also been nominated for The Gilded Age’s ball-centric finale. Directors are only able to submit one episode for Emmy consideration per show, so it’s incredibly rare to see a double nomination; Richardson-Whitfield’s double nominations were the first in the Drama directing category since 1967, when Paul Bogart was nominated for directing the Hal Holbrook one-man show Mark Twain Tonight! and CBS Playhouse’s “The Final War of Olly Winter.”
While stray writing and directing nominations — that is, nominations for shows that didn’t get Drama Series or Comedy Series nominations — are decently common, it’s rare that a show will get nominated by both the writers and directors and still get shut out from the top categories. Since the Drama Series and Comedy Series categories first expanded beyond five nominees in 2009, it’s happened four times in Comedy and three times in Drama. Louis C.K.’s Louie did it in 2012, before returning as a Comedy Series nominee in 2013, 2014, and 2015; Showtime’s Episodes got the double in 2014; Hulu’s historical comedy The Great got writing and directing nods in 2020; and just last year, the second season of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal pulled it off. In Drama, it happened for AMC’s buzzy first season of The Killing in 2011, Apple TV’s Bad Sisters in 2023, and in a case that amounts to a technicality, The Handmaid’s Tale in 2019, a year when five of the show’s second-season episodes aired after the previous year’s eligibility cut-off, so those episodes were eligible for episode-specific awards (writing, directing, guest-acting, and craft awards) but not for Drama Series.
Even though it’s a bummer for these shows to not get placement in the Emmys’ top categories, there’s a badge-of-honor element to these nominations — writers tend to know good writing, and directors tend to know good directing.
We’ve talked a lot about the power bloc in the Comedy categories, where Hacks, Abbott Elementary, Only Murders in the Building, and The Bear have been posting up since 2021. Over the past four years, these four shows have accounted for 77 of the total 181 major nominations in Comedy. Though The Bear saw its nomination total slip again, all four of these shows remained Outstanding Comedy Series nominees. Having premiered in the same season, Abbott Elementary and Only Murders in the Building both qualified for a rare distinction this year — or they will if neither of them wins Comedy Series, which neither are expected to do. They’re only the third and fourth shows ever to be nominated for Comedy Series five straight times without winning. The only previous shows to pull this off were Silicon Valley from 2014 to 2018 (losing three times to Veep, bookended by losses to Modern Family and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and The Larry Sanders Show, which went six years in a row during the heyday of Seinfeld and Frasier from 1993 to 1998.
Sure, there’s something of a Glenn Close quality to being nominated so many times without winning. But TV is a medium marked by staying power, so to stay at the top for so long, year after year, is a feat, one that even all-time greats like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Girls, and Family Ties couldn’t pull off.
Saturday Night Live performances — both regular cast members and guests — used to be the domain of the now-defunct Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program category. Chevy Chase won there, as did Gilda Radner and Dana Carvey. Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Tine Fey were among the nominees over the years. After the category was discontinued in 2009, the SNL performers were made eligible in the general Comedy categories with hosts and walk-on performers eligible in Guest Actor/Actress.
That year, Justin Timberlake and Tina Fey won the Guest Actor and Guest Actress in a Comedy awards for their SNL appearances, and from there the floodgates opened. In the 18 years since they were made eligible, SNL guest performers have earned 58 nominations and 14 wins. Justin Timberlake has two Emmys for hosting SNL. So do Jimmy Fallon and Dave Chappelle. Three of Louis C.K.’s 39 (!) career Emmy nominations have come from hosting SNL. It’s less depressing on the women’s side of things, which has mostly been the domain of Tina Fey and the stars of Bridesmaids. You can’t complain about Maya Rudolph getting seven nominations and two wins over the years. Between 2016 and 2021 (so the entirety of Trump 1.0), SNL guest hosts were nominated 31 times (averaging almost exactly five noms per year) and won eight trophies.
But for the moment, the era of SNL owning the guest categories appears to be over. Last year was the first since 2009 where SNL was shut out of the guest-acting nominations. Last year, The Studio barged in and gobbled up six nominations; this year, Hacks did the same. But it’s not like strong competition had ever been a problem for SNL guests before. When The Bear racked up five guest nominations in 2024, its peak Emmy year, SNL still managed nominations for Rudolph, Kristen Wiig, and Ryan Gosling.
This also marked only the second year since 2009 that no Saturday Night Live regulars were nominated in the Supporting Actor or Supporting Actress categories, despite significant buzz (and campaigning) for Ashley Padilla and Marcelo Hernandez. The show’s only performance nominee this year ended up being Connor Storrie, a nomination that can easily be chalked up to his notoriety for Heated Rivalry and to make up for Heated Rivalry being ineligible overall.
It’s tough to argue that SNL didn’t have strong contenders with good Emmy narratives. Former cast members Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler were on the nomination ballot, as were previous nominee Ryan Gosling (for hosting in 2024) and previous winner Melissa McCarthy (for hosting in 2017). Colman Domingo got nominated in two other performance categories this year, and Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show pulled in nine total nominations — clearly voters were into both. But for whatever reason, SNL didn’t inspire the urge to vote that Hacks or Shrinking or Widow’s Bay did.
It’d be foolish to ring any kind of death knell for Saturday Night Live at the Emmys. Its nomination history has always ebbed and flowed. But it used to seem like Emmy voters scanned the guest-acting ballot for SNL guest hosts and voted for three to five of their favorite ones, and for the time being, that’s not the case.
Saying “rough year for the Kennedys” feels simultaneously like an overstatement (considering the actually rough years the Kennedys have experienced throughout the last century) and an understatement (Jack Schlossberg ate it hard in his Democratic congressional primary; RFK Jr.’s quest to kill Americans with preventable disease continues apace). But it was hard not to notice that Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s underperformance in the Emmy nominations was mostly a case of snubs for the cast members who played Kennedys.
Paul Anthony Kelly’s not exactly exalted performance as JFK Jr. missing out on a nomination wasn’t too terribly shocking (nor was it unjust), but pretty much every Emmy pundit was expecting nominations for Grace Gummer as a bereft Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. As much as some people found Naomi Watts’s melodramatics as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to be over the top, it seemed like the kind of over the top that would work on awards voters. I even thought Jessica Harper’s primly domineering Ethel Kennedy might warrant a nomination. Not so! Instead, Sarah Pidgeon’s locked-in nomination for playing Carolyn was joined by Constance Zimmer’s more controlled and affecting turn as the practical and ultimately devastated mother of the Bessette women.
Tempting as it is to attribute this to the voters en masse lifting up their “BESSETTES FOREVER, KENNEDYS NEVER” placards, it was more likely a case of the voters being less enthused with the show overall. Alessandro Nivola’s widely predicted nomination for playing Calvin Klein never materialized, after all.
If you watched the televised nomination announcement last week, you wouldn’t have heard a peep about the MGM+–Prime Video series Spider-Noir. You might be surprised, then, to learn the series — a live-action superhero tale loosely spun off from the animated Spider-Verse movies where Nicolas Cage voiced the character — picked up 11 nominations. That’s a better Emmys performance than Shrinking, Slow Horses, The Bear, The Beast in Me, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s obviously the best Emmy performance by an MGM+ series ever and ranks with the best Emmy hauls for a Prime Video show alongside The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and the first season of Fallout.
It’s an Emmy achievement accomplished entirely outside the realm of the major categories. All 11 nominations are Creative Arts categories: cinematography, production design, makeup, editing, music. If you take away guest-acting nominations and focus purely on technical and craft achievements, no other show on TV outperformed Spider-Noir with only Hacks equaling its 11 nominations.
It’s the kind of nomination portfolio that you see much more often at the Oscars, where movies like The Dark Knight or The Matrix pick up gobs of nominations in tech categories without the benefit of Best Picture placement. Spider-Noir, if you go by the artisans who vote in their respective Emmy branches, is the technical and craft achievement of the year.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was a pleasant surprise for many as an Outstanding Drama Series nominee. Not only did it suggest that half-hour (or close to it, anyway) shows could contend in the Drama category, but it also proved that the Academy’s taste for the tales of Westeros has not been lost. This would be very good news for the folks at House of the Dragon, whose currently airing third season found the Game of Thrones sweet spot of scattering a bunch of interesting characters across the map and letting them maneuver their way around the show’s dynastic concerns.
House of the Dragon got an Outstanding Drama Series nomination in 2023, though only eight total nominations that year. Last year, that tally dropped to six total nominations, none in the major categories. But it turns out the fire that Emmy voters used to have for George R.R. Martin’s fantasy universe hasn’t been extinguished after all. Sustaining the buzz of a well-performing third HoTD season all the way to next July’s nominations won’t be easy for HBO, but I’d say its chances look better than they did a week and a half ago.
Here’s my favorite Emmy stat that I’ve come across in quite a while: The Outstanding Directing nominees in Comedy, Drama, and Limited/Anthology each feature the wordiest episode title in the history of that category.
In Comedy, Andrew DeYoung is nominated for directing The Chair Company’s premiere episode, titled “Life Goes by Too F**King Fast, It Really Does.” At nine words, it ties the previously sole record holder, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, which in 1991 was nominated for series finale “Here’s a Little Touch of Harry in the Night.”
In Drama, Salli Richardson-Whitfield’s nomination for Task is for the episode “Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing, There Is a River.” At 11 words, it outpaces the previous record holder, Sirens, the early-’90s Canadian American cop drama that in 1993 was nominated for an episode called “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
In Limited/Anthology, Jake Schreier is nominated for directing the Beef episode “It Will Stay This Way and You Will Obey.” That nine-word title bests the two previous record holders: Ryan Murphy’s 2017 nomination for directing the “And the Winner Is… (The Oscars of 1963)” episode of Feud: Bette and Joan, and Nicole Kassell’s 2020 nomination for the Watchmen episode (and Oklahoma!-quoting) “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice.”
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