India Makes Emmy History as 22 Nations Enter the International Race

NEW YORK — The nominees for the 2026 International Emmy Awards arrived Wednesday from 22 countries. Three of those countries, including the United Kingdom, India, and Argentina, landed nominations in both the Drama Series and Comedy Series categories. None of them were competing as equals when the streaming era first began dissolving the old assumptions about whose television the world was watching.

India’s nominations mark the first time the country has reached both of the International Emmys’ top two series categories in the same year. Real Kashmir Football Club, a Sony LIV original directed by Mahesh Mathai and Rajesh Mapuskar, stars Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub and Manav Kaul in a drama drawn from the true story of assembling a professional football club from local recruits in the Kashmir Valley. It earned India’s drama nomination alongside Steven Knight‘s Hulu and Disney+ series A Thousand Blows, which tracks the Forty Elephants, an all-female crime syndicate in 1880s London, and their entanglement with the city’s illegal bare-knuckle boxing world. The drama category also includes France’s Carême, an Apple TV+ French-language period drama built around the life of the chef widely credited with inventing classical French cuisine, and Menem, Argentina’s Amazon MGM Studios dramatization of former president Carlos Menem’s rise and the moral accounting his era still demands.

For Comedy Series, Vir Das: Fool Volume placed India alongside Netflix UK’s Man vs. Baby, featuring Rowan Atkinson as a father catastrophically unprepared for the role, Argentina’s División Palermo (Community Squad) in its second season, and Spain’s Old Dog, New Tricks.

The United Kingdom led the entire field with 15 nominations. Brazil followed with nine and Spain with four. In all, 64 nominees compete across 16 categories, with the 54th International Emmy Awards Gala scheduled for November 23 at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City. Trophies are awarded by panels of television industry professionals from outside each nominee’s home country, a jury structure designed to strip away domestic advantage that has defined the International Emmys since their inception.

Brazil’s nine nominations were concentrated in documentary. Among them: Passinho Foda: Uncredited (The Story of Passinho), a Red Bull Media House production tracing the origins of Rio de Janeiro’s passinho street dance style, and Máscaras de Oxigênio Não Cairão Automaticamente (Oxygen Masks Will Not Drop Down Automatically), co-produced by Morena Filmes and Warner Bros. Discovery Brazil. Brazilian documentary has been a consistent presence at the International Emmys, drawing on subjects including urban culture, social conditions, and the specific textures of Brazilian public life that find attentive juries far outside the country. Similar Brazilian non-fiction work has drawn recognition in other global events, including the Toronto International Film Festival, which closed its 51st edition on September 20.

The full field of 22 countries extends to Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, and Türkiye. Canada’s Heated Rivalry, an anticipated entry, did not advance to the nominees list, a cut that underscores the competition’s growing intensity as streaming investment has expanded the volume of internationally eligible original productions. Qualifying has become progressively harder; the ceiling of 64 nominations has not moved, and the pool beneath it has grown considerably.

The 2026 nominations land in the same autumn window as the rest of the global awards calendar. The 78th Emmy Awards recognized the American primetime field at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on September 14, with The Pitt and Hacks leading their respective categories before the ceremony. The International Emmys follow two months later, effectively the second summit of the television year, handling the output from 200-plus eligible countries that the primetime Emmys do not reach.

The 2026 field also coincides with a period of structural change in what the International Emmys consider eligible. Productions existing primarily on streaming platforms, which would once have required special consideration under traditional broadcaster-only eligibility frameworks, now make up a majority of the Drama and Comedy Series nominees. A Thousand Blows, Carême, Menem, and Real Kashmir Football Club are all streaming originals from Hulu, Apple TV+, Amazon MGM Studios, and Sony LIV respectively. The International Academy did not design its categories for a world in which the same show airs simultaneously in London, Mumbai, and Los Angeles, but its 2026 nominees reflect that world regardless.

For the shows themselves, November 23 is the next question. The Venice Film Festival concluded September 12 with Woman Unknown taking the Golden Lion, capping the first major event of the fall season. The International Emmys close the circuit on global television in a way that Venice and TIFF cannot, not cinema, but the medium that reaches more people, in more living rooms, more nights of the week, than any other format that exists. Whether Real Kashmir Football Club can make a jury of European and South American television professionals feel what its audience in India already feels is not a question the nominations can answer. The full nominees list was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter.