Bait, Emmys 2026, Hacks, The Bear, The Pitt, The Studio
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.
Source: filmmakermagazine.com