LOS ANGELES — Seven statues. One language barrier shattered. And a Puerto Rican artist who once sold fruit juice on the streets of Vega Baja now holds the record for the most decorated Super Bowl halftime performance in Emmy history.
The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny won all seven of its nominations at the 2026 Creative Arts Emmy Awards on Saturday night at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. The sweep gave the reggaeton superstar his first Emmy victories and cemented a February performance that the television industry had debated for months.
It was the largest haul ever earned by a Super Bowl halftime act.
The show won Outstanding Variety Special (Live), the top programme award, along with honours for music direction, choreography, sound mixing, lighting design, technical direction, camerawork, and directing. Its clean sweep across the creative and technical categories left little ambiguity about what the television industry’s peer voters thought of the production.
It was also, by one meaningful measure, the first time television’s highest honors have ever recognized a Spanish-language program in the Outstanding Variety Special (Live) category. The 13-minute performance – conducted almost entirely in Spanish, with Bad Bunny performing “Títí Me Preguntó,” “El Apagón,” “MONACO,” “NUEVAYOL” and a cascade of others from his catalog – was accepted into the Emmy record book in the language in which it was built.
Jay-Z, who executive-produced the show through Roc Nation, won his third Emmy. The rapper-turned-mogul, who has been the subject of a new HBO documentary examining his decades in the music industry, has now won Emmys across three separate Super Bowl halftime productions, a producing streak that has no parallel in television’s annual awards. The acknowledgment was brief in the room – the Creative Arts ceremony is known for moving fast – but its significance landed.
The February performance itself had been constructed as something closer to a film than a concert. Bad Bunny’s team built a narrative around Puerto Rican identity and diaspora, weaving special guests including Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, Karol G, Cardi B, Pedro Pascal, Young Miko, and Jessica Alba into a show that progressed like a love story set in the island’s cultural landscape. The choreography Emmy reflected months of intensive rehearsals; the lighting design award recognized a visual environment that turned the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans into a theatrical space unlike anything the halftime tradition had produced before. The show was executive produced by Roc Nation and Bad Bunny’s production company, Conejo Malo Productions.
The prior record had been held by the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show, the 2022 hip-hop spectacular featuring Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and 50 Cent, which won four Emmys. Bad Bunny’s show nearly doubled it. The Hollywood Reporter, which covered the Creative Arts ceremony in full, described the sweep as without precedent in the history of the Outstanding Variety Special (Live) category.
For an artist whose career has been defined by rewriting record books – he became the most-streamed artist on Spotify for three consecutive years, the first Latin act to headline Coachella, and the first Puerto Rican artist to headline a Super Bowl halftime – seven Emmys represent something fundamentally different from a commercial milestone. These were voted on by television industry peers. The Recording Academy, the streaming platforms, and concert attendance figures measure popularity. Emmys measure craft.
Apple Music has been the Super Bowl halftime show’s naming rights partner since 2022, when it replaced Pepsi as sponsor. The company’s investment in the halftime franchise – which has increasingly positioned the live entertainment moment as a platform for ambitious production rather than a straightforward concert set – received its most visible institutional validation Saturday night in Los Angeles. Nine nominations going in, seven awards coming out.
What happened at the Peacock Theater was the craft side of the television industry delivering a unanimous verdict. Seven categories entered. Seven categories won. The Puerto Rican artist did not make a public statement at the ceremony; his creative team – directors, choreographers, lighting designers, sound engineers – accepted each award in sequence, building a cumulative picture of the industrial effort behind those 13 minutes in New Orleans.
The Emmy record belongs to a Puerto Rican artist performing almost entirely in Spanish. That the television industry gave it to him unanimously, across both program and craft categories, is the detail that will outlast the specific statues.
