The Emmy Awards on Sunday night gave a boatload of awards to just a couple of shows: The Studio in the comedy categories, and Adolescence in the limited series categories. The Pitt took home the top prize in the drama category, but it wasn't all a three-show parade. We've got a few takeaways from a night that was a real mixed bag.
It was not a good telecast
In a long opening bit, host Nate Bargatze made a series of jokes about television, all about how The Learning Channel doesn't have learning anymore and The History Channel has shows about aliens. (It is not your imagination; these are very stale jokes.) Then Stephen Colbert gave out the first award, to Seth Rogen for The Studio, and then Bargatze introduced his disastrous evening-long bit by taking several boring minutes to claim that he would donate $100,000 to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, but would take away money if winners' speeches went over 45 seconds. This is an ugly idea, mean and counterproductive. People watch awards shows to see the awards, and most would probably rather you cut the host and presenter yammering. Throughout the evening, as the winners were speaking, an onscreen graphic showed the amount of money going to charity decreasing in real time. It was distracting and repetitive and kind of insulting, and Bargatze just kept bringing it up over ... and over ... and over. (Of course the charity got all the money at the end. Everyone knew they would. The point wasn't to give or not give the money; it was to give the host a bit that he could reference repeatedly in lieu of jokes.)
This was not the only problem. When Severance's Tramell Tillman won for supporting actor in a drama series, it turned out that presenter Jason Bateman didn't know how to pronounce his name. Later in the evening, Bargatze either forgot the name of Gilmore Girls or thought it would be funny to pretend to forget what it was called while introducing a tribute to it. It was a strangely low-energy affair from a producing standpoint.
Those were some really deserving winners
And now the good news: Despite the poor execution of the ceremony, there were some wonderful wins on Sunday. The big winners were The Studio from Apple TV+, The Pitt from HBO Max and Adolescence from Netflix, which are all good shows. And while those three shows took up an awful lot of oxygen, there were other fine winners, too.
While a lot of folks were pulling for Harrison Ford to win his first-ever Emmy for his great work on Shrinking, perhaps the most purely delightful win of the night went to Jeff Hiller, who won in the supporting actor in a comedy category for the exquisite HBO show Somebody Somewhere. The show didn't get the recognition it should have gotten, it didn't run as long as it should have, and this is the only Emmy it will ever win. But along with its creator and star, Bridget Everett, Somebody Somewhere's beating heart was Hiller, whose work as Joel was indelible, unforgettable and utterly unique. It is exactly the kind of performance that should win and very rarely does, and the win is cause for celebration. Everybody's going to be happy, too, for Tillman, whose work on Severance was richly deserving of the win for supporting actor in a drama, and for his co-star, Britt Lower, who won for lead actress.
Speaking of perhaps unanticipated wins, the highly regarded Andor is prized by the people who love it, not only for its quality but also for its timeliness as a story of a forming rebellion in a time of political strife. Its win for outstanding writing for a drama series, alongside wins in creative and technical categories, gave it a spotlight moment on a night dominated by a handful of shows.
The Studio cleans up
Awards have typically been plentiful when show business has a chance to honor stories about show business. This year, the big beneficiary was The Studio, Apple TV+'s comedy starring Seth Rogen as a new studio head stuck between his love of cinema and his drive to succeed in a movie industry that doesn't care as much about cinema as it does about a deal to make a live-action Kool-Aid movie. The series won for top comedy series, best lead comedy actor Seth Rogen, and for outstanding writing and directing. Those wins were added to a bunch of creative and technical wins for music supervision, sound editing and sound mixing, picture editing, costumes, cinematography, production design, guest actor Bryan Cranston, and casting. That's a big haul, and it continues Apple's status as a maker of some good TV that wins awards, even if a lot of what they make also vanishes into the ether with little notice.
The Emmys give some love to a little throwback TV
In a lot of ways, The Pitt, a hospital show with 15 episodes rather than the now-fashionable 12 or 10, is an old-school drama. It's set in a realistic location, it doesn't rely on antiheroes, and it's led by Noah Wyle, who's been a TV star since he started on ER, one of broadcast's sturdiest dramas, in 1994. The Pitt was named outstanding drama series, it won Wyle a trophy, it won one for supporting actress Katherine LaNasa, and at the creative and technical awards last weekend, it won a bunch more, including honors for casting and guest actor Shawn Hatosy.
The Emmys still have a lot of love for Severance, but this year, they handed out their biggest drama prize to a less experimental show. It's going to be interesting to see whether there's any reconsideration of the general rule that a prestige streaming drama has no more than 12 episodes, or further exploration of old formats that might find new life.
The Bear may have overplayed its "we're a comedy" hand
It is now a hackneyed joke (made in the opening skit of this year's telecast, in fact) that The Bear competes for awards as a comedy despite not being a comedy. It's not the only instance of so-called "category fraud," but it's probably the best-known instance. This strategy worked in The Bear's first two years of competing — it even was named best comedy series in 2023, over several actual comedies, including Ted Lasso and Abbott Elementary. This year, The Bear again had the option of submitting itself as what it is (a drama), but it didn't.
The approach doesn't seem to be paying off anymore. Sunday night, The Bear was left out in the cold. While the season being honored Sunday night (which was not the most recent one, but the one that aired in 2024) wasn't as well-regarded as the first two had been, it wouldn't be surprising if voters also started to feel increasingly reluctant about denying comedies they like the recognition they deserve. Perhaps when next year's Emmys roll around, wiser heads will prevail and The Bear will proudly submit itself as a drama.
Netflix is excelling in the world of the limited series
Three of the five 2025 nominees for outstanding limited or anthology series came from Netflix: Black Mirror, the Menendez brothers season of Ryan Murphy's Monsters, and the winner, Adolescence. And it didn't stop there: Adolescence took every award handed out in the limited series categories on Sunday night except for lead actress, which went to Cristin Milioti for The Penguin.
Interestingly, with Squid Game and The Crown ending, it's not clear how many regular drama series Netflix will get into Emmy contention going forward. It's never had the same success at the Emmys with those as with limited series. Netflix has won in the best drama series category only once, for a season of The Crown. By contrast, counting Adolescence, it's now won four of the last five limited series awards, also winning for Beef, Baby Reindeer and The Queen's Gambit. In fact, Netflix's only loss in that time frame was to The White Lotus, when that show was competing in this category before switching to compete as a drama series. In other words, Netflix hasn't lost this award to anything except a perhaps misplaced HBO drama series since HBO's Watchmen won in 2020. Perhaps this is where their prestige attention will go.
A few notable no-shows
Sunday night's ceremony left out at least three pretty formidable contenders in addition to The Bear: The Last of Us, which had 16 nominations this year, won nothing, though they took home a sound editing award last weekend at the creative and technical awards. The White Lotus had 23 nominations and won only for its main title music. That's partly the result of crowded drama categories, but particularly with The White Lotus, it may also be a result of audiences cooling a bit to recent seasons.
Stephen Colbert's Late Show goes out on a high Emmys note
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert won its first Emmy ever, for directing, last weekend. Then, after being nominated for years and never winning, it won the Emmy for best talk series on Sunday night. This summer, CBS announced that it was ending the show next spring, and Colbert's outspoken criticism of both President Trump and Paramount made a lot of his fans highly skeptical that the cancellation was purely financial. Colbert has been getting a lot of support and praise as The Late Show winds down, he received a rousing round of applause when he took the stage early in the show, and then Emmy voters sent him off with a victory. Colbert's speech had an evident sense of loss, but was ultimately spirited and joyful, acknowledging his feelings of grief about the state of the world but adding, "I have never loved my country more desperately."
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