What Happened
The Television Academy unveiled the nominations for the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards on the morning of Wednesday, July 8, in Los Angeles, and the shape of the race was clear within about ninety seconds of the livestream. The Pitt, the HBO Max hospital drama that won the top drama prize a year ago, led the entire field with 25 nominations. Hacks, closing out its fifth and final season, came in with 24 — the most any comedy series has ever collected in a single year, edging past the record of 23 previously shared by The Bear and The Studio. Recent winners Liza Colón-Zayas and Jeff Hiller read the names.
Behind the two leaders, the freshman class did unusually well. Apple TV's Widow's Bay, a spooky dramedy campaigning in the comedy categories, pulled 19 nominations, the highest total for any new show. Pluribus, the Vince Gilligan series built around Rhea Seehorn, landed 18. Netflix's Beef returned with a second anthology installment and 16 mentions. HBO Max's DTF St. Louis, starring David Harbour, took 13, while Saturday Night Live and MGM+'s Spider-Noir tied at 11 apiece.
The drama series category ended up split almost evenly between two streamers: The Pitt, The Gilded Age and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for HBO Max; Pluribus, Slow Horses and Your Friends & Neighbors for Apple TV; with Netflix's The Diplomat and Hulu's Paradise rounding out the eight. The comedy field paired the expected returnees — Abbott Elementary, The Bear, Hacks, Only Murders in the Building, Shrinking, Nobody Wants This — with two Apple newcomers, Margo's Got Money Troubles and Widow's Bay.
In the lead acting races, Noah Wyle is back to defend his drama actor win for The Pitt, against Sterling K. Brown (Paradise), Gary Oldman (Slow Horses), Mark Ruffalo (Task) and Rufus Sewell (The Diplomat). Jean Smart, already a three-time winner for Deborah Vance, is nominated one last time opposite Quinta Brunson, Ayo Edebiri, Elle Fanning and Lisa Kudrow, whose return in The Comeback supplied the morning's most satisfying piece of symmetry.
Why It Matters
Nomination totals are the closest thing television has to a public scoreboard, and this year's reads like a snapshot of an industry that has finished consolidating and is now living with the consequences. HBO Max topped all platforms with 122 nominations. Netflix was second with 111. Apple TV took third with 89 — its best showing ever, and by a wide margin the biggest year-over-year gain of the three.
What makes those numbers interesting is the direction of travel. HBO Max's 122 is down from the all-time record of 142 it set last year, and Netflix slipped from 120 to 111. Neither drop suggests a collapse; both suggest that the volume of prestige output has come off its peak. Apple, meanwhile, climbed on the back of two first-year shows, which is the hardest way to do it. A platform that grows its Emmy count through freshman series is a platform whose development pipeline is working, not one coasting on the back catalogue.
Zoom out to the parent companies and the picture sharpens further. Warner Bros. Discovery counted roughly 150 nominations across HBO, Warner Bros. and cable channels; Walt Disney Co. tallied 125 across Hulu, FX, ABC and National Geographic; NBCUniversal's platforms combined for 90. As a studio, Warner Bros. Television Group booked 52 nominations, and notably it earned them by selling shows to other people's networks — Shrinking to Apple, Abbott Elementary to ABC, Leanne to Netflix. The arms-dealer model, written off during the peak-streaming land grab, is quietly having a very good year.
The traditional broadcasters are still here, though the shape of their presence has changed. ABC took 35 nominations, CBS 32 and NBC 30. Nine of the CBS total came from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which is finishing its run — a reminder that a show can be at the height of its craft recognition and still not survive the economics of late-night television in 2026.
The Reaction
The morning's dominant storyline was Pluribus, and the reason is Rhea Seehorn. For six seasons of Better Call Saul she was the actor critics insisted was being overlooked; now she has a Vince Gilligan series constructed entirely around her, an 18-nomination haul, and a lead drama actress nomination in a field that includes Carrie Coon, Keri Russell, Zendaya and Chase Infiniti. If there is a sentimental favorite this year, she is it.
Hacks setting the comedy record on the way out is the other emotionally loaded number. Final seasons tend to be treated generously by voters, but 24 nominations is not a courtesy — it is the entire ensemble, the writing, the directing and the craft categories all landing at once. The counterargument, which surfaced almost immediately, is that a farewell-season sweep of nominations rarely converts into a farewell-season sweep of wins; the Academy has a long habit of nominating goodbyes and then giving the trophy to something new.
The snubs conversation, as always, ran hotter than the nominations themselves. The consensus complaints centered on the crowding at the top: with The Pitt, Hacks, Widow's Bay and Pluribus absorbing 86 nominations between them, the mid-tier shows that would have collected three or four mentions in a thinner year were squeezed out entirely.
There is also a quieter story in the craft categories, where Spider-Noir's 11 nominations — most of them technical, plus one for original music — showed MGM+ punching several weight classes above its subscriber count. Craft recognition has become the way smaller platforms get on the board at all.
What Comes Next
The Creative Arts Emmys, where the bulk of those craft categories are actually decided, run on September 5 and 6. The main ceremony follows on Monday, September 14, at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, airing live on NBC and streaming on Peacock. Mariska Hargitay hosts — the first woman to do so in fifteen years.
This year's telecast also introduces the Legacy Award, the Academy's first new major award in nearly two decades, to be given annually to programs judged to have had a lasting cultural impact. It is a transparent attempt to build a segment that gets older audiences and long-running favorites onto a stage otherwise dominated by shows most viewers have not seen. Whether it plays as a genuine honor or as an awards-show equivalent of a nostalgia reel will depend entirely on the first recipient.
Between now and September, the campaign phase begins in earnest: the panels, the screeners, the trade ads. Voting for winners opens in late summer. Historically the show with the most nominations wins the top prize a little more than half the time, which is to say The Pitt's 25 makes it the favorite without making it safe.
Closing Thoughts
The most telling number in the 2026 nominations is not 25 or 24 or 122. It is the gap between HBO Max's 142 last year and its 122 this year — a twenty-nomination decline at the top of the industry that nobody is treating as a crisis, because everyone understands what produced it. The peak-streaming years generated more prestige television than any awards body could absorb, and the correction was always going to show up here first, in the one place where the industry keeps score in public.
What replaced that volume is more interesting than the volume itself. Apple's best-ever year came from two shows nobody had heard of eighteen months ago. Warner Bros. Television's 52 nominations came from selling to rivals. The record-setting comedy is one that is ending. Television in 2026 is not producing less that is worth watching; it is producing less, and being more careful about it, and the Emmy ballot is the first document to say so out loud.
한글 요약
미국 TV 아카데미가 7월 8일 로스앤젤레스에서 제78회 프라임타임 에미상 후보를 발표했습니다. HBO Max의 의학 드라마 더 피트(The Pitt)가 25개 부문 후보에 올라 전체 1위를 차지했고, 다섯 번째이자 마지막 시즌을 마친 해킹(Hacks)이 24개로 뒤를 이었습니다. 이는 단일 연도 코미디 시리즈 최다 기록으로, 기존 더 베어·더 스튜디오가 공유하던 23개를 넘어섰습니다. 신인 시리즈 중에서는 애플TV의 위도스 베이(19개)와 빈스 길리건·리아 시혼의 플루리버스(18개)가 두각을 나타냈습니다.
플랫폼별로는 HBO Max가 122개로 1위, 넷플릭스가 111개로 2위, 애플TV가 역대 최다인 89개로 3위였습니다. 다만 HBO Max는 지난해 최고 기록(142개)에서, 넷플릭스도 120개에서 각각 줄었습니다. 스트리밍 확장기의 대량 제작이 정점을 지났다는 신호로 읽히는 대목입니다. 반면 애플TV의 상승은 전적으로 신작 두 편에서 나왔고, 워너브러더스 TV 그룹은 자사 채널이 아니라 애플·ABC·넷플릭스에 판매한 작품들로 52개 후보를 확보했습니다. 지상파는 ABC 35개, CBS 32개, NBC 30개였습니다.
시상식은 9월 14일(월) 로스앤젤레스 피콕 시어터에서 열리며 NBC 생중계·피콕 스트리밍으로 공개됩니다. 진행은 마리스카 하지테이가 맡아 15년 만의 여성 단독 진행자가 됩니다. 크리에이티브 아츠 부문은 9월 5~6일에 먼저 치러지고, 올해는 약 20년 만의 신설 주요 부문인 '레거시 어워드'도 처음 수여됩니다.
참고: Variety · CBS News · 78th Primetime Emmy Awards · Television Academy