Episodic Discussion: The 75th Primetime Emmy Awards

I had the pleasure of joining David Chen and Patrick Klepek at Decoding TV—as part of their relaunch as a once-weekly podcast—to discuss this year’s 75th Primetime Emmy Awards. You can listen to the podcast here, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or watch the embedded video below.

However, I want to add a few things about the narrative coming out of Monday’s broadcast. One of the things about the modern award show is that the stories we end up telling after the fact are increasingly about the state of modern award shows. It’s an existential moment for a dying form, and this year’s Emmys heightened this with a broadcast tinged with nostalgia for an age where award shows were monocultural events (with all the reunions) and such complete dominance by three shows (The Bear in Comedy, Succession in Drama, and Beef in Limited Series) in the awards themselves to question what we’re really honoring here.

It was not, to be clear, a disastrous Emmys: it was an extremely effective nostalgia engine that showed respect for the medium’s history, and the three shows that dominated the night are objectively worthy even if some have strong feelings about genre fraud with one of them (eh, I’m not that bothered). But in some ways, that’s what made our conversation about the show so philosophical—a well-produced broadcast with deserving winners should be affirming of the award show’s value, but the situation has simply devolved to a point where no amount of work and no set of winners will rescue the Emmys from a narrative about the death of the Emmys.

We talk about the show’s uncertain future—the broadcast contract is up in 2026—in the podcast, but one wrinkle I wasn’t able to discuss was next year’s Emmys. Because what we are going to see next year is an unprecedented amount of turnover: of this year’s 16 nominees for Drama and Comedy Series, only four (The Crown, The Bear, Abbott Elementary, and Only Murders in the Building) will have aired episodes within the eligibility window. And on the acting side, because of the dominance of Succession and The White Lotus in supporting categories, roughly ten of the 54 nominees for acting categories across Drama and Comedy will likely be eligible.

Now, some shows that weren’t eligible this year like Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Morning Show, and Hacks are no doubt going to fill some of these slots, having been well nominated in the past, and there’s one past nominee that was skipped this year (What We Do In The Shadows) that could return. But there’s going to be an immense vacuum within the awards, and what moves in to fill it will be a pretty huge litmus test of what the Emmys will look like in the future. Is there space for broadcast hits like Ghosts? Can FX’s success with The Bear translate into the deserved attention for the third and final season of Reservation Dogs? And do any of the shows nominated give hope of the Emmys finding relevance among younger demographics who are clearly not invested in the inherent idea of celebrating television as a medium?

We’re getting ahead of ourselves, but while there are certainly stories to discuss about this year’s awards (like Better Call Saul’s surely record-setting 0-53 run), I’m more curious what people can imagine being nominated next year in what will be perhaps the single weirdest set of nominees in history.