Mariska Hargitay Is Hosting Monday’s Emmys. She Already Won Two Last Week.

LOS ANGELES — Mariska Hargitay spent years making a documentary about a woman she barely knew. Her mother, Jayne Mansfield, died in a car crash on a Louisiana highway in June 1967, when Hargitay was three years old. What followed, by the actor’s own account, was decades of absence—not of her mother’s image, which appeared constantly in tabloids and retrospectives, but of any version of her that felt honest.

“My Mom Jayne,” which Hargitay produced, directed, and appears in alongside her siblings, is the result of that reckoning. At the 78th Creative Arts Emmy Awards on September 5, the Television Academy awarded it Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program, honors typically reserved for prestige streaming projects rather than personal films by working television actors.

Hargitay now carries those two statuettes into the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Monday, where she will host the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards on NBC at 8 p.m. ET, becoming the first woman to hold that position solo in fifteen years. It is an unusual double identity: most Emmy hosts arrive at the stage as celebrities adjacent to the evening’s competition. Hargitay arrives as a participant in it, having already been judged by the same body whose awards she will now hand out.

The Creative Arts weekend, which ran September 5 and 6, also delivered one of the more statistically striking outcomes in Emmy history for variety programming. “The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny” won seven awards on the ceremony’s first night, the most ever collected by a Super Bowl halftime production in Television Academy history. The Puerto Rican artist, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, collected his first Emmy alongside wins in Outstanding Variety Special (Live), Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special, Outstanding Music Direction, Outstanding Choreography, Outstanding Sound Mixing, Outstanding Lighting Design, and Outstanding Technical Direction. Jay-Z, who produced the halftime show, added a third Emmy to his existing collection. The production incorporated Puerto Rican cultural imagery and large-scale choreography, with appearances from Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin.

What those seven awards say about Monday’s drama and comedy races is limited: the Emmy calendar separates craft and production categories from the series and acting races that broadcast audiences watch for. But the weekend confirmed what the Emmy season preview mapped out in early September: the Television Academy rewards shows with high nomination counts at scale, and the two programs leading that count, The Pitt at 25 and Hacks at 24, carry momentum the creative arts results reinforced.

The Pitt, the HBO Max medical drama that won Outstanding Drama Series at last year’s ceremony, almost doubled its nomination total from 13 to 25 in its second season. Thirteen of those nominations went to its acting ensemble alone, a cast-as-bloc showing that has few modern equivalents in the Emmy record books. Noah Wyle, who won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2025 for the same role, returns as the lead acting nominee. Katherine LaNasa and Shawn Hatosy, who both won supporting awards last year, are back in the same categories alongside newly recognized cast members. Each season of the show covers a single 15-hour emergency room shift across 15 hour-long episodes, a structural constraint that has proved unusually effective at sustaining ensemble performance.

Hacks approaches its final season in a position of structured dominance. Jean Smart has been nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series every season the show has run and has won each time. With 24 nominations, a single-season record for any comedy series, the show’s farewell run carries the institutional goodwill the Academy tends to crystallize into a send-off win. Whether that pattern holds is the most predictable story of Monday night, and predictability in awards ceremonies is its own form of suspense.

The less predictable story belongs to Euphoria, whose third and concluding season divided critics and audiences through a finale that killed its lead character. The show did not receive a nomination for Outstanding Drama Series, a significant omission for a series that once commanded the category. Zendaya’s nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama is her third for the same role, and a win would make her the first actor to claim that award three times for a single character. Colman Domingo earned a guest actor nomination for his supporting turn in the season. Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney, who received nominations in previous seasons, were not included.

Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour: The Final Show” arrives in five variety categories, including Outstanding Variety Special (Prerecorded), where the Television Academy will render its verdict on the concert film format Swift has now been nominated for twice. The five nominations represent an unusual incursion for a music artist into Emmy territory, and the outcome will say something about how the Academy positions itself relative to the cultural weight of the touring economy.

The one variable the Creative Arts weekend could not resolve is what Hargitay’s hosting style will produce in the room. She told NBC that she intends to focus on celebration rather than the comedian-host format the Emmys has defaulted to, hosting what she called “the Mariska Emmys.” Whether that framing holds for three hours in front of the industry’s most opinionated audience, no one can say before Monday. The woman who arrives holding two trophies and plans to hand out dozens more has at least one documented qualification no previous host has carried into the room. Whether that’s enough is the only question the evening still has to answer.