Two HBO Max shows have 49 Emmy nominations between them
The Pitt arrives at Monday's ceremony with 25 nominations and Hacks with 24, on a night NBC is broadcasting and Mariska Hargitay is hosting.
The 78th Primetime Emmy Awards are handed out on Monday at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, and the nominations tell a story the broadcast will not.
The Pitt, the HBO Max hospital drama, leads with 25 nominations, twelve of them in major categories. Hacks has 24. Between two shows on one streaming service, that is 49 nominations before the rest of the field gets a look.
Apple TV's Widow's Bay follows with 19.
The races
Outstanding drama series pits The Pitt against The Diplomat, The Gilded Age, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Paradise, Pluribus, Slow Horses and Your Friends & Neighbors.
Comedy is the crowded one. Hacks defends against Abbott Elementary, The Bear, Margo's Got Money Troubles, Nobody Wants This, Only Murders in the Building, Shrinking and Widow's Bay.
The limited series field is All Her Fault, The Beast in Me, Beef, DTF St. Louis and Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette.
The host, and what she is not
Mariska Hargitay hosts. She is the first person to front the Emmys since 1993 who is not a comedian or a television personality, and the first woman to do it since 2011.
That is a choice, and a defensible one. A ceremony that has spent a decade apologising for its own length tends to hire someone to make jokes about it. Hiring the lead of a show that has run for 27 seasons on the network broadcasting the ceremony is a different pitch, aimed at the people who still watch television as it airs.
The thing the Emmys keep proving
The Television Academy has added a Legacy Award this year and merged its scripted variety and talk categories, which is the sort of housekeeping that happens when a category stops having enough entrants to fill it.
Meanwhile the shows in front are almost entirely streaming shows, on a night carried by a broadcast network that needs the audience. NBC and Peacock carry the ceremony live at 8pm Eastern.
Nominations were announced on 8 July. Everything since has been campaigning, and on Monday it stops.
Reporting this piece draws on
The writer
Priya Raman — Awards and festivals treated as a campaign beat: strategy, precursor maths, voting bodies and money, from first screening to final ballot.
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