The shows everyone’s watching are finally getting the recognition they deserve. (From left: Dale Dickey in Widow’s Bay, Constance Zimmer in Love Story, Ariana Madix in Love Island USA.)
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Apple TV, Peacock, FX
If you’re reading this column, you’re probably familiar with the feeling of TV as an obligation. Rushing to wolf down an entire season that dropped on a Friday and needs to be finished by Sunday or else you’ll get spoiled. Plodding through slow-paced dramas that would’ve been so much better as two-hour movies. Sure, no one’s forcing you to watch eight hours of 3 Body Problem, but if you want to learn the solution to the titular three-body problem, you have to press on. For the last decade or so, that sense of obligation was reflected at the Emmys, where voters dutifully returned again and again to shows they couldn’t possibly have still been excited about. Six seasons of The Crown, five seasons of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, four seasons of Stranger Things. The final few seasons of Game of Thrones were that show’s most-nominated Emmy years by far — does anyone think those were the best seasons of Game of Thrones?
We haven’t entirely moved past that era of television, but Wednesday’s Emmy nominations signaled that the members of the Television Academy seem to be enjoying television again. Nineteen nominations for the horror-comedy Widow’s Bay — a show that premiered very late in the season and was far from Apple’s top awards priority — showed that voters can still be curious TV viewers and vote accordingly. The TV Academy earned its reputation for being stubborn and not sufficiently reactive to the good and exciting in a given TV season, but it really seemed to find its discernment in 2026.
It’s not just that there are more nominated shows I’d consider “better” than in other years. It’s that the acting categories represent 33 different shows. It’s that Dale Dickey got her first Emmy nomination after more than three decades working in television for the kind of small but hilarious role that could’ve easily been overlooked. It’s that Dancing With the Starsreturned to the Reality Competition lineup after experiencing a creative and ratings resurgence, and that the show it displaced was The Amazing Race, which has never not been nominated. It’s that the only Saturday Night Live acting nominee was Connor Storrie, most likely because Emmy voters loved him on the ineligible Heated Rivalry so much.
Even something as potentially irksome as one TV series gobbling up seven of the 14 Supporting Actor/Actress Drama nominations — as The Pittdid this year — feels much less lazy than when, say, The White Lotus gets that treatment. The way The Pitt lays out its criss-crossed story arcs and threads its cast members in and out of every scene, it only makes sense to nominate the supporting cast in batches. It was great watching Katherine LaNasa win the Emmy last year, but it was undoubtedly strange that she was the only supporting nominee representing The Pitt. If anything, I could make the case that more Pitt cast members could have been nominated. Who does Isa Briones have to scowl at to get an Emmy nomination around here?
So much of what’s new and exciting about this year’s Emmys lineup is coming from Apple TV and HBO. With 122 nominations, HBO led all platforms, followed by Netflix in second place with 111. But as has been the case with Netflix for several years now, those gaudy totals are deceiving. Among the major categories (the ones presented on the main Emmys telecast), HBO leads with 45, followed by Apple TV with 29, and Netflix in third with 26. Apple TV had its best-ever nomination morning with 87 total nominations (up from 79 last year). Most impressively, Apple landed six total nominees in Outstanding Comedy and Outstanding Drama categories: Widow’s Bay, Shrinking, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles in Comedy; Pluribus, Slow Horses, and Your Friends & Neighbors in Drama. It’s not only Apple’s best showing in the top two categories, it’s the best showing by any network or platform in Comedy and Drama Series since NBC in 2000. (Netflix’s only series nominations in Comedy and Drama were Nobody Wants Thisand The Diplomat, respectively, with Nobody Wants This pulling in only two nominations total.)
HBO still has the most nominations and the two most nominated series in The Pittand Hacks. At this point, nothing is going to threaten The Pitt from repeating its Outstanding Drama Series win, but Outstanding Comedy Series is shaping up to be the big HBO-versus-Apple showdown with the sunsetting Hollywood insidery of Hacks going up against the word-of-mouth enthusiasm for Widow’s Bay’s spooky small-town antics
Widow’s Bayand The Pitt represent a cadre of TV shows that have brought back the enjoyment of weekly episodic TV. Much has been made over the last two years about how The Pitt has been a return to a more classic experience of television: longer seasons, weekly episodes that can be anticipated and then discussed. This kind of TV never went fully away, of course, and you could argue that the biggest Emmys successes in recent years like Succession and The White Lotus have preserved the appointment-television appeal of an HBO Sunday night show, albeit with fewer episodes. But this year’s Emmy crop feels like that kind of TV is all the way back. A huge part of the Widow’s Bay appeal was how contained each episode’s creepy conceit was. The one with the haunted inn, the one where Patricia throws a party, the (not penultimate!) flashback to colonial times. It’s not as purely sitcom-y as Abbott Elementary — the lone nominated network series for every one of its five seasons — but it’s a show that knows why a show like Abbottworks and takes its cues from that traditional style. Even Hacks, which has leaned so hard over the years into its long-developing story arcs about Deborah and Ava’s personal/professional relationship, has been quietly excellent at the “situation” part of situation comedy: Deborah and Ava go to a fan convention, Deborah and DJ go on The Amazing Race, Deborah and Ava pretend to be lesbians for reasons! The tide has definitively turned against the binge model of viewing and releasing episodes that Netflix introduced in the mid-2010s. (Among this year’s Comedy, Drama, and Limited Series nominees, only 24 percent were binge releases: FX’s The Bear and Netflix’s lineup of The Diplomat, Nobody Wants This, Beef, and The Beast in Me.)
These nominees are also fun. It’s hilarious that the same HBO that leaned so hard into The Sopranos as a model for its dramas — and which still gets its share of mileage out of crime thrillers about haunted men, see Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey’s nominations for Task — is now represented in Outstanding Drama by The Gilded Age for the second time in three years. Or that the legacy of Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin’s fantasy universe is now being represented by a show as cheerful and silly as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
In short, these Emmy nominations feel like they were chosen by people who watched and loved a lot of TV this year. How else to explain Summer House breaking through into the Outstanding Unstructured Reality category? Or Ariana Madix landing an Outstanding Reality Competition Host nomination? Or Constance Zimmer leapfrogging the more heavily buzzed Naomi Watts and Grace Gummer to get that Love Story Supporting Actress nomination? The occasional frustrating choices and heartbreaking snubs are easier to take when the Emmy voters realized TV, like summer, should be fun.
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