Emmy Awards nominations 2026: What you need to consider

Jul 09, 2026

It’s one of the big annual calendar dates in TV today with the Emmy Awards nominations announced. This brings to an end of work done by publicity teams working hard to make sure that expected nominees land their spots, with a larger swathe of publicists working to get outside chance nominees their moment(s) in the spotlight.

Often it can be a win just being talked about as a possible nominee.

This year’s prime-time show nominees:

Overall, including all the below-the line tradespeople awards, here are the most-awarded shows:

The Pitt — 25
Hacks — 24
Widow’s Bay — 19
Pluribus — 18
Beef — 16
DTF St. Louis — 13
Saturday Night Live — 11
Spider-Noir — 11
The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny — 9
The Beast In Me — 9

And networks/platforms:

HBO Max — 122
Netflix — 111
Apple TV — 87
ABC — 38
CBS — 32
NBC — 30
Prime Video — 28
FX/Hulu — 23
Hulu — 22
Peacock — 18
Disney+ — 14
National Geographic — 12
MGM+/Prime Video — 11
MTV — 11
Comedy Central — 8

The story of this year’s Emmys is already being focused around the fantastic Widow’s Bay. It helped Apple TV break its own record for award nominations, firmly positioned at #3 with 87 noms.

Matthew Rhys films a trippy scene in episode five of Widow’s Bay.

Here’s Apple TV programming chief Matt Cherniss being interviewed at Deadline:

DEADLINE: Widow’s Bay is one of the stories of the day, 19 nominations is a great haul for a new show.
CHERNISS: It’s a tricky thing, balancing the timing and deadlines for certain awards shows with the decision about where you think the show can be most successful on your service, and how you can get the biggest audience possible to it. I think that, in this case, we were looking at our schedule and looking for a moment in time that we felt like we could give the show everything that it deserved, and I’m definitely glad that we got the best of both worlds, and that we were able to have a later start than maybe is common, but also get the show the nominations and the kudos that Katie and Hiro and Matthew and the entire team deserved.

He also addressed whether he thinks horror show Widow’s Bay is a comedy:

DEADLINE: For years, the question has been asked, ‘Is The Bear a comedy?’. Is Widow’s Bay a comedy?
CHERNISS: For the purposes of these categories, I think that that’s a fair thing to do. I certainly laugh at the show. I guess at the end of the day, the audience will decide, or I should say the voters will decide, whether they feel like a show qualifies or not. They nominated this as a comedy, so I think that it is one of the scariest comedies I’ve seen, but, but I feel comfortable with the show in that category.

I’ll say this… Widow’s Bay had me laughing more than The Bear did.

In a fun bit of trivia, THR notes that All’s Fair, a show I believe may be the worst thing I saw in 2026, was nominated for two Emmys (in hairstyle and makeup categories), is now tied for the number of nominations The Wire received during its entire run on HBO.

A couple of thoughts by me:

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will win in this year’s Outstanding Variety Series category because it was cancelled for reasons that were connected to politics. Was it the best show of the year? Absolutely not. If I were voting, would I have voted for it? Probably.
Emmy voters are often hard to budge. Once they start awarding a show in a category, they tend to stick with that show until it ends… or is replaced by an extremely more shiny show. Hacks seems like a lock for the Outstanding Comedy category, but Widow’s Bay has so much heat around it right now. I haven’t seen a new show with this much buzz since The Pitt, which will more than likely go on to sweep its categories again this year.
The only nomination that offended me this year was seeing Paradise nominated for its awful second season when The Lowdown didn’t get a look-in. And by that same measure, Sterling K. Brown wasn’t bad in Paradise, but The Lowdown star Ethan Hawke is right there not nominated…
I have loved Michael J Fox my entire life. But I really struggle to agree with his nomination for Shrinking – a role which was a glorified walk-on appearance. It’s a fairly weak category which, by all rights, should be given to Widow Bay’s Hamish Linklater. But… how can you vote against Michael J Fox?

And then there’s one of my pet peeve issues…

It’s worth noting that, again, the Outstanding Movie category has been bounced from the primetime awards. This is incredible when you consider how much money and value streaming services place on original movies.

I don’t blame the Academy for this. It’s the streamers themselves who aren’t nominating their best originals at the Emmys.

This years nominees:

Heads of State
Miss You, Love You
People We Meet On Vacation
Jack Ryan Ghost War
Remarkably Bright Creatures

Just for a point of comparison, you might be interested to know what the highest rated original streaming movies were, as per Rotten Tomatoes…

Predator: Killer of Killers (Hulu) — 97%
KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix) — 96%
Train Dreams (Netflix) — 95%
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Netflix) — 95%
Deep Cover (Prime Video) — 90%
Miss You, Love You (HBO) — 88%
Frankenstein (Netflix) — 86%
In Your Dreams (Netflix) — 86%
Remarkably Bright Creatures (Netflix) — 85%
Jay Kelly (Netflix) — 79%

As I wrote back in January:

Nobody wants to tell filmmakers responsible for their prestigious feature film that they are being put up for the Most Outstanding Television Movie when they could instead pitch being nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.
‘Television Movie’ is a boner killer.
My contention has been that if Netflix and its fellow streamers embraced the Emmys best movie category full-throatedly, it would have two significant impacts:
1) Emmys would be won - surely ‘winner’ is a better selling point than ‘nominated’
2) It would create actual heat around that category. The Emmys, rightfully, should be ending its nights with the best movie category, followed by the best TV show category.
These movie nominations all come with considerable star-power for the Most Outstanding Actor and Actress categories too.

The Emmys this year did the right thing by changing the category name to remove ‘Television Movie’ from the title. Although, I note that on the Emmys website today, it still brands it as ‘Outstanding Television Movie’.

News Desk

Netflix has today announced Beyond Society, a documentary series from director JA Bayona following what happened to the survivors of Flight 571. Bayona directed Netflix’s very good Oscar-nominated (but not Emmy nominated) film Society of the Snow, which focused on the crash in the Andes. Read: thefutoncritic
Prime Video has cancelled its faith-based comedy drama It’s Not Like That after one season. Read: Deadline
The BBC has greenlit a third season of Ludwig ahead of the second season return. Read: Radio Times
Stephen Dubner is launching a new interview show for his Freakonomics YouTube channel. Read:

Trailer Park

M3GAN spin-off film SOULM8TE is skipping a cinema release and will go straight to streaming on August 1.

Unnerving, suspenseful, and darkly compelling, SOULM8TE follows a grieving engineer tasked with testing a ruthless tech giant’s new AI companion. But when he attempts to program her to be a truly sentient soulmate, she develops needs of her own - unleashing a relentless spree of precision-engineered mayhem.

You+Me - Against The World debuts on Prime Video Sept 18.

A story you won't forget anytime soon. You+Me - Against the World, the adaptation of the book by Emma Green with Vittoria Di Savoia and Lucas Barski.

Elize: Shadows of a Woman debuts on Netflix July 22.

In this retelling of a real case, a former escort discovers her wealthy husband's infidelity and struggles to cope as betrayal poisons their marriage.

Flex x Cop returns for season 2 on August 7 on Disney+.

That’s the newsletter for the today.

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