LOS ANGELES — When Mariska Hargitay walks onstage at Peacock Theater on September 14, she will become the first woman to host the Primetime Emmy Awards in fifteen years. That historical marker is one of many things making the 78th Emmy cycle feel like a realignment season, one in which streaming’s deepest dramas, a farewell comedy that broke records, and a pop superstar are all competing in categories nobody would have scripted three years ago.
The season begins Friday, a week and a half early, when the Television Academy opens the Creative Arts Emmy ceremonies at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. The two-night event covers craft categories from animation to sound mixing, with the awards airing September 12 on FXX and streaming September 13 on Hulu. The full primetime ceremony follows on September 14 on NBC and Peacock.
By the metrics that television’s industry-insider class watches most closely, this year’s race is tighter than it has been in years. The Pitt, HBO’s medical drama starring Noah Wyle, leads all programs with 25 nominations, the highest total for any series this cycle. Behind it sits Hacks, Max’s comedy about an aging Las Vegas stand-up and her young writer, with 24 nominations in what is also the show’s final season. Jean Smart, who plays Deborah Vance with a combination of brittle arrogance and unwanted vulnerability that few working performers can manage, is again in the running for the lead actress comedy prize she won in each of the show’s first two seasons.
Hacks holds the record this year for most nominations earned by a comedy series, a significant fact given that it is competing against Abbott Elementary, The Bear, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Nobody Wants This, Only Murders in the Building, Shrinking, and Widow’s Bay in a category that reflects television’s current fractured geography. Widow’s Bay, the season’s third-highest nominated series overall with 19 nominations, has built its audience in relative silence, which is itself a story about how the Emmys have drifted from the monoculture that once made them a mass cultural event.
The drama field is similarly dispersed. The Pitt competes against The Diplomat, The Gilded Age, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Paradise, Pluribus, Slow Horses, and Your Friends & Neighbors, a list that spans broadcast, cable, and at least four different streaming platforms, reflecting an industry in which a strong performance can be nominated regardless of how many people actually watched it.
Taylor Swift’s presence in the field is the detail most likely to cut through to audiences who stopped tracking Emmy nominations after the era of peak prestige television gave way to peak everything else. Her concert film “The Eras Tour: The Final Show,” which documented the closing night of the largest-grossing concert tour in history, earned five nominations on Disney+, including Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded). The film was directed by Glenn Weiss, a sixteen-time Emmy winner. For Swift, the nominations mark her second time on Emmy’s ballot, a development her fans have greeted with the kind of attention that tends to lift ceremony ratings regardless of whether she attends.
Dancing with the Stars, which this week revealed its Season 35 celebrity cast, is nominated in the Outstanding Reality Competition Program category, connecting two of the season’s bigger entertainment stories in the same Emmy ballot.
The 28 first-time Emmy nominees this cycle include performers and creatives whose recognition signals which streaming platforms have broken through decisively with the academy’s voting membership, according to NBC News. That membership shift has been gradual but now appears structural. The days when broadcast television could anchor the major drama and comedy categories with a single dominant network hit appear to be over.
According to the full nominee list reported by ABC News, this year’s field includes stronger representation from limited series and anthology categories than any recent cycle, partly because streaming platforms have doubled down on the format as a hedge against the attention fragmentation that makes multi-season renewals increasingly hard to predict.
Hargitay, who has spent more than two decades on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as Olivia Benson in one of the longest-running roles in American network television, brings to the hosting role a combination of industry credibility and cultural familiarity that the Television Academy will be hoping translates to viewers on NBC and Peacock. The last woman to solo host the Emmys was Tina Fey, though she and Amy Poehler co-hosted in 2021, which does not reset the clock on the solo standard.
The full nominations, which EH covered when they were announced in July, suggested a year in which the Television Academy was catching up to where the audience had already moved. Whether the September 14 ceremony confirms that or produces the kind of surprise that reminds everyone why envelopes are still opened in person is the question the industry will spend the next ten days debating.
What is certain is that the Creative Arts ceremonies beginning Friday will set a tone. A series that sweeps production design and music often sees that energy translate into voter enthusiasm for its acting and writing nominations ten days later. The Pitt’s 25-nomination footprint means it will be visible across both weekends. So will Hacks, making its final appearance in a category it has owned for three seasons.
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