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Nathan Lane, Forest Whitaker, and Cherry Jones all received Emmy nominations this week.
Photo: Christopher Willard/Steve Wilkie/Disney+
With 123 categories all told on the entire 2025 Emmys ballot, you’d be forgiven for not noticing every little nuance. There are 19 acting categories alone, and those are usually the only ones people care about. So after the initial dust settled on Tuesday’s announcement, I set out for a deep dive into the Emmy ballot to procure some insights, trends, and trivia. How many shows got nominated for Best Series but didn’t get acting nominations? Did Saturday Night Live have a good Emmy day or a bad Emmy day? Why is a gay multi-cam sitcom about Palm Springs one of the five best-directed episodes of the year?
You’ll forgive the ire of those of us who just spent several months tracking the Emmys race and talking ourselves into believing Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars series might improve upon its 2023 showing, when the show was one of the eight programs listed as Outstanding Drama Series nominees but received no acting nominations. Technically, Andor did do slightly better this year, thanks to Forest Whitaker’s Guest Actor in a Drama nomination for his turn as the gas-huffing revolutionary Saw Gerrera. But once again, Diego Luna felt the cold shoulder of Emmy voters in the Lead Actor in a Drama category, and brilliant turns by Stellan Skarsgard, Genevieve O’Reilly, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller, and Adria Arjona went unrecognized. It’s ultimately not shocking that a series billed as a prequel to a middlingly popular Star Wars spinoff was ultimately not able to attract a critical mass of voter support, no matter how great the show actually was. And, ultimately, 14 total nominations, including series, directing, and writing nods, isn’t exactly the cold sting of rejection. But I did talk myself to the brink of hope for some of those actors.
While Netflix may have only produced one Drama Series nominee (The Diplomat) and one Comedy Series nominee (Nobody Wants This), the platform was more dominant than ever in the Limited Series field. For the first time, Netflix placed three series in the Outstanding Limited Series field, for Adolescence, Black Mirror, and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. It was only the second time since the category was separated from TV movies and rechristened Limited Series in 2015 that one network/platform has gotten three nominees (Hulu did it in 2020 with Dopesick, The Dropout, and Pam & Tommy).
Even more impressively, Netflix dominated the Limited Series/TV Movie acting categories as well, pulling in 10 of the available 22 nomination slots. This included surprise nominations for Meghann Fahy in Sirens and Rashida Jones in Black Mirror.
Another niche of the Emmy ballot where Netflix cleaned up: stand-up comedy. The Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded) category had already been trending more and more toward the hourlong stand-up specials, but this year’s lineup was almost entirely that (Conan O’Brien’s Mark Twain Prize ceremony isn’t a proper stand-up show, but it’s still obviously focused on comedy). Of the six nominees, Netflix produced five of them: the Conan special plus stand-up hours from Adam Sandler, Ali Wong, Sarah Silverman, and Emmys host Nate Bargatze. Only Bill Burr stands against the Netflix tide, repping his Hulu special.
Actors always get the most attention when it comes to the Emmys, so let’s give a few of them their due right here.
•Noah Wyle’s Lead Actor in a Drama nomination for The Pitt was his sixth career nomination, but his first in 26 years. The next longest streak-breaker this year was Joe Pantoliano, whose Guest Actor nod for The Last of Us was his first since winning for The Sopranos 22 years ago.
•Scott Glenn, Guest Actor nominee for The White Lotus, earned his first Emmy nomination at the age of 86. Harrison Ford just picked up his first-ever Emmy nomination at age 83, for Shrinking. They join a list of 31 performers earning their first-ever acting nomination. That list includes A-listers like Colin Farrell and Jake Gyllenhaal, debut performers like Adolescence’s Owen Cooper, and longtime performers getting their first taste of Emmy recognition like Katherine LaNasa (The Pitt) and Michael Urie (Shrinking).
•There is also a not inconsiderable number of Academy Award winners in these Emmy ranks. We’re years past the days when TV actors and film actors were seen as distinct and rarely overlapping spheres, but the 11 Oscar winners nominated for Emmys this year ties an all-time record set in 2017 (11 Oscar winners at the time, plus three — Allison Janney, Regina King, and Laura Dern — who would soon win) and matched in 2020 (11 Oscar winners at the time, plus future winner Kieran Culkin). Now to anticipate which 2025 Emmy nominee will be the next to become an Oscar winner (Owen Cooper, I’m looking at you, buddy).
Emmy voters have their favorites, same as anyone, and it’s fascinating to watch how those tendencies manifest themselves every year. Sterling K. Brown has officially entered can’t-miss territory — if he wasn’t there already — with his nomination for Paradise. It’s his 11th nomination overall, spanning seven different TV shows. And somehow he’s not the biggest Emmy fave on the ballot. Kathy Bates’s Matlock nomination is her 15th overall (14 for acting and one for directing the TV movie Dash & Lily in 1999), spanning 11 different shows. Also don’t sleep on Jane Alexander, nominated for her guest appearance on Severance. This is Alexander’s eighth Emmy nomination, dating all the way back to when she played Eleanor Roosevelt in a 1976 miniseries. Kathryn Hahn, Giancarlo Esposito, Merritt Wever, and Uzo Aduba all added to their hefty Emmy résumés on Tuesday, each of them having now been nominated for four different TV shows.
So it ought to be easy to predict Emmy nominees, right? Just bet heavily on the actors who have been most frequently nominated in the past. Not so fast, it turns out, as huge Emmy faves with solid claims on a nomination this year fell short. Allison Janney is a 15-time Emmy nominee, spread out over The West Wing, Mom, and Masters of Sex. So a nomination for her supporting role on The Diplomat seemed like a given, especially as The Diplomat was popular enough to make the Drama Series field. Alas, it didn’t happen, perhaps due to the fact that Janney only appeared in two of the season’s six episodes. Maybe she ought to have slummed it with the guest actresses.
Meanwhile, a pair of 18-time Emmy nominees also fell short: Ted Danson didn’t make the cut in Lead Actor in a Comedy despite being delightful in Mike Schur’s A Man on the Inside. And Jon Hamm, despite being on the ballot as a lead in Your Friends and Neighbors, as supporting in Landman, and as a guest on Saturday Night Live, went zero-for-three. Emmy voters also had three chances to give Nathan Lane his ninth nomination, but he came up short in Lead Actor in a Comedy (Mid-Century Modern), Supporting Actor in a Limited Series (Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story), and Guest Actor in a Drama (Elsbeth).
It’s crass to hold the Emmys up as the only bastion of success in the industry, so ignore the glibness of “Fails.” That said, let’s take a look at which shows absolutely failed!
With a few notable exceptions, it was a rough one for shows that leaned heavily toward genre. The Penguin did the best of all of them with 25 nominations, and we already discussed how Andor deserved more than its 14 nods. HBO’s House of the Dragon pulled in six nominations in the Creative Arts categories, but it was unable to repeat its Outstanding Drama Series nomination of two years ago, which only contributes to the reputation the show has for being a letdown from the highs of Game of Thrones.
What about that ballyhooed Patti LuPone performance? Supporting Actress in a Comedy had seven slots — none for Patti, I guess. I thought this was an Emmy ballot, not a Broadway open letter!
Emmy voters also seemed quite allergic to pricey intellectual-property brands, giving only four nominations to HBO Max’s Dune Prophecy and one lonely nomination to Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, bringing its two-season Emmy total to … seven creative arts nominations, zero in the major categories.
And then there’s the matter of the Taylor Sheridan Television Universe. Every year I wonder if this might be the year that his heavily consumed, lightly respected shows pull in some Emmy nominations. Let’s check the scoreboard: two nominations for 1923, two more nominations for Tulsa King, one for Lioness, and in what was surely the biggest blow to anyone still holding onto Taylor Sheridan Emmy stock … zero for Landman, despite the presence of Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Hamm, and acclaimed master thespian Jerry Jones.
Other shows that had realistic hopes for nominations but wound up with zero to show for it included Showtime’s Yellowjackets (a steep decline after Outstanding Drama Series nominations in 2022 and 2023), Hulu’s Natalia Grace series Good American Family, Netflix’s wellness-scammer limited series Apple Cider Vinegar, and the Jeff Bridges–starring The Old Man.
Vulture was all over the Industry beat after HBO’s show about hot finance sociopaths got shut out for the third straight season. “But Marisa Abela is so hot right now!” I know, I know. Our collective affection for the talk-show chaos of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney on Netflix wasn’t enough to lift it to more than one lonely craft nomination. Nor did our love for sexy, sumptuous Interview With the Vampire translate to more than a scant two nominations (hairstyling and makeup).
Also, can somebody grab a bundle of sage and walk through the Elsbeth set and release whatever bad juju Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi put on Robert and Michelle King’s post–The Good Wife universe? First, The Good Fight goes criminally unrecognized for its entire run, now Elsbeth can’t even get a guest nomination for putting on whole-ass musicals on network prime-time TV.
And don’t even get me started on zero nominations for the spy series Black Doves, because I won’t stop screaming “Oh just the BEST SHOW ON NETFLIX starring certified hotties Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw getting utterly jobbed out for no good reason at all!”
•For the first time since 2008, Saturday Night Live received zero nominations in the Guest Actor and Guest Actress in a Comedy categories. This despite the fact that SNL and all its ancillary 50th-anniversary specials pulled in 31 nominations in total.
•I’m thrilled that Severance’s 27 nominations included one in the Outstanding Choreography category for Tramell Tillman’s “The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnel” marching-band routine.
•And yet where was the choreography nomination for Mon Mothma’s wedding-reception reverie on Andor? Or for the opening-credits dance routine that nearly led to a group-text cast revolt on the set of The Perfect Couple? I guess anything that feels that good is illegal!
•Good nominations across the board in the always fun Original Music and Lyrics category. You get the ballad of “The Witches Road” from Agatha All Along (it’s back in your head now); the stunning “We Are the Ghor” from Andor; Adam Sandler’s tune from SNL 50; something rude and nihilist from The Boys; and the Oscar-snubbed, Kristen Wiig–penned “Harper and Will Go West” from Will & Harper.
•Speaking of, how was Will & Harper able to pivot from a failed Oscar campaign to a successful Emmy campaign? Such are the rules within the Documentary section of the Emmys — so long as a doc isn’t nominated for an Oscar, it can submit for the Emmys. Yes, it seems quite sketchy, but it’s hard enough to get any attention for documentaries that aren’t about suburban murder mysteries, so I’m letting this slide.
•Another quirky Emmy rule pertains to the Directing for a Comedy Series category. The rules say that at least one of the nominees in that category must be for a multi-cam comedy. In recent years, multi-cam comedies like BET’s The Ms. Pat Show and CBS’s B Positive have been nominated. This year, the designated multi-cam is Hulu’s Mid-Century Modern, a worthy nod to a perfectly enjoyable older-gays-in-Palm Springs comedy.
•With the addition of Kind, LLC founder Daniel Lubetzky as a seventh regular co-host, Shark Tank breaks its own record for most hosts representing a single nomination in the Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality Competition Program.
•The three nominations for Nathalie Emmanuel, J.K. Simmons, and Kevin Hart in the Outstanding Performer in a Short Form Comedy or Drama Series category for Die Hart: Hart to Kill, stand as the last existing remnants of Quibi. The first season of Die Hart launched with the short-lived provider of quick bites, before transferring to the Roku Channel.