Here we are, at another Emmy season, with all the campaigning, candidacies and canapés a human could possibly want.
It seems like it was just Emmy season last year. And yet a full 12 months have gone by, bringing with them a giant new slate of contenders. (Well, not as giant as it could be, but more on that in a second.)
You may not fully feel the awards season vibes with the state of the world so tenuous and the state of TV … not much better. Fears of automation, contraction and general diminution abound everywhere. Not to mention the prospect of AI engulfing physical sets and/or writers rooms, as The Comeback savagely portrayed this season.
At the television upfronts in New York City in mid-May, legacy networks like NBC, CBS and HBO were lapped by Amazon and YouTube — when they were there at all. The event made clear that TV is tech companies’ world now and, more to the point, often content creators’ world; the YouTube presentation, with its Jessers and its Alex Coopers, was the talk of the week.
Yes, the state of scripted television can seem as bleak as a plotline from Breaking Bad, which, come to think of it, feels so very long ago. And the numbers back up that outlook: After hitting a peak of nearly 1,700 original series in 2022, the total number plunged to barely 1,100 in 2025 — a drop of nearly a third. But that doesn’t mean quality can’t be found. We’re just drawing from an increasingly shallow pool.
Indeed, the number of legitimate cultural breakthroughs — the Successions, Crownsand Handmaid’s Tales of five years ago, never mind the Mad Mens, Homelandsand Game of Thrones of a decade ago — appear limited. Quality viewing experiences still happen, but they’re fractured into more niche offerings or come from older properties, or just TikTok.
Even some hot titles from last year aren’t here this season. No Studio, no Severance, no Andor, no Last of Us, no White Lotus. And the buzziest show of this year, Heated Rivalry, isn’t eligible thanks to an Emmy technicality.
When breakthroughs did happen in the past year, they tended to come in more recycled guises: a Stranger Things franchise that began a decade ago this summer, or a Pitt that draws from a formula that began more than 30 years ago.
But while freshness may feel in shorter supply, shorter doesn’t mean short. And, yes, because this is an awards special, and an awards column, optimism must prevail — it’s why we do all this, after all. But you also have plenty of actual reasons to find optimism in this current landscape.
A few immediately come to mind:
The cringe-comedy charm of Jury Duty: Company Retreat.
The slept-on charm of Margo’s Got Money Troubles.
The familiar but also timeless and deeply human charm of, yes, The Pitt.
The ’90s charm of Love Story.
The you-hate-them-but-you-just-can’t-seem-to-stop-watching-them charm of I Love LA.
Plus, the best Emmy moments tend to come out of nowhere. See: Jeff Hiller’s surprise win last season for his supporting performance in Somebody Somewhere. “For the past 25 years I’ve been like, ‘World, I want to be an actor,’ and the world’s like, ‘Maybe computers?’ ” a jubilantly human and pink-tuxedoed Hiller said to the room, which absorbed and returned the spontaneity in kind.
Or Katherine LaNasa’s win for her perfect supporting performance as Nurse Dana on The Pitt, another tale of a longtime toiler suddenly and unexpectedly getting a statuette. Sure, moments like this could happen in the Peak TV era, but they were a lot less likely. Who had room for fresh faces when Jon Hamm was always around?
That’s the beauty of Emmy season. Whether it’s a busy year for television or a quiet one, a hot time or a cool period, nifty stories always somehow manage to find their way to us. The best stories are the ones you never quite believe can happen, until they do. I don’t know what will unfold in the bid for a Taylor Sheridan show to land its first-ever major Emmy nomination — whether awards and populism will ultimately converge — but it might just go down with Landman, and I’m excited to see it play out.
I also don’t know if The Comeback could win its first major Emmy with its blockbuster, well, comeback season, or if Lisa Kudrow can score her first Emmy in nearly 30 years. But the fact that this could happen — and with a show about Hollywood teetering on an AI abyss, no less — makes the whole prospect pretty tasty.
So let the takes about the end of television and the fracturing of the attention economy and the Leviathan of AI begin. Let the counter-takes about the triumph of art and the power of creativity and humans’ need for storytelling begin, too. We will surely get plenty of all of them, with varying degrees of adjudicating clarity.
When it comes to scripted television, are we in a decline or a transition? No one truly knows. But this season will help us find out. Hopefully with some pretty great pink tuxedo moments along the way.
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
