Award ceremonies are always more fun when there’s a surprise or two stuffed into the envelopes. There was a big one waiting at the end of Sunday night’s 76th Primetime Emmy Awards: Despite a whopping, record-breaking 23 nominations (some for televised awards and some not), The Bear didn’t pull a repeat of last year’s ceremony and take home Outstanding Comedy Series again. The last award of the night instead went to HBO’s Hacks, a different kind of workplace comedy that in its third season continued to trace the relationship between an aging stand-up comic (Jean Smart, who won an Emmy last night, too) and the young writer (Hannah Einbinder) shadowing her. Were voters spreading the wealth? Or was the upset an acknowledgment that, however funny, Christopher Storer’s chaos-in-the-kitchen sensation is more of a drama with some laughs than any kind of comedy in the traditional sense?
Either way, don’t cry for FX. The cable network that airs The Bear picked up 36 Emmys this year, more than any of its competitors. Many of those went to the night’s big winner on the other end of the genre aisle: the historical-fiction epic Shogun, which came into the night the nomination leader and ended it the freshman recipient of Outstanding Drama Series. The parallel Emmy-night near sweeps of these two critical darlings (coupled with a Supporting Actor win for Fargo’s Lamorne Morris earlier in the evening) have solidified FX as the prestige TV incubator of the moment, above Apple TV+ and even HBO. But more than that, they point to an ongoing transformation in the way we qualify the popularity and success of a TV show in this content-overdose, binge-happy modern era.
Almost none of the shows nominated for Emmys this year could be called ratings juggernauts in the traditional sense. The only scripted series to show up in the major categories and on Nielsen’s list of the 100 most-watched programs of the year was Abbott Elementary. Relatedly, that ABC sitcom was also the lone network show that competed for top Emmys on Sunday night. Anyone looking to make the case that awards don’t reflect the tastes and interests of the average viewer could point to the exclusion of TV’s recent chart-toppers: the Yellowstone franchise; the final season of Young Sheldon; the brand-new CBS action smash Tracker, which premiered the night of the Super Bowl and just a couple of weeks before Shogun.
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This chasm between what the public is watching live and what Emmy voters are celebrating wasn’t always so vast. Back in the ’90s, television’s biggest night often revolved around television’s biggest shows—watercooler hits like ER, The X-Files, and Seinfeld, which stopped channel surfers in their tracks as reliably as they racked up glowing reviews and Emmy attention. Of course, the big four networks’ iron grasp on awards season began to slacken in the 2000s with the rise of HBO milestones like The Sopranos and Sex and the City and the emergence of basic-cable players like AMC and FX, which suddenly added their own voices to the TV-is-the-new-novel conversation. A year after Netflix started developing originals, Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards were nominated. By then, the Emmys (along with fellow statuette bestowers the Golden Globes) were looking beyond Nielsen rankings and ratings.
It might be tempting to conclude that award tastes have simply trended artier these past few years, that the Emmys are shining a spotlight on less overtly commercial TV as a reflection of bolder sensibilities. That’s a nice thought, that voters might see a nomination or win as a way to increase a worthy show’s viewership, rather than merely reaffirming the taste of those already watching. (They did that with Arrested Development back in the day, coming to the rescue of a ratings-challenged sitcom in its infancy.) Much likelier, though, the move away from major network behemoths has more to do with the kinds of projects those companies are increasingly pursuing: The networks behind Emmy darlings like The West Wing and Lost are no longer investing much in shows with the ambition of The West Wing and Lost. Consequently, TV’s most gifted creators have migrated from network TV to the greener pastures of premium cable and streaming services. It’s no surprise that a network show hasn’t won Outstanding Drama Series since 2006.
The larger reality is that the way we now identify a TV hit has changed, because the way we all watch TV has changed. No, you won’t find Shogun, The Bear, or Hacks on that Nielsen top 100 list; the people who watch broadcast TV enough to be selected as a self-reporting panel household aren’t watching these shows religiously. But the series’ streaming numbers tell a different story. In many ways they’re broadcast TV shows—like your grandfather’s TV was—that you simply don’t have to catch live. In that sense, the Emmys haven’t so much stopped honoring hit TV as adapted their selection process to a world with a more complicated metric for measuring what is or isn’t a hit. It’s why streamers like Apple TV+ and Netflix—the other big winners of Sunday night—have found a foothold with the Emmys. These days, there’s no way to capture and honor the zeitgeist of a year of television without paying ample attention to shows without ratings, in the normal sense.
So how have the Emmys mapped the streaming era of television? Sunday night’s winners paint a picture of an organization still starstruck and enthralled by pedigree: Many of the acting awards not handed to members of the Shogun, Hacks, and The Bear ensembles went instead to movie stars and Hollywood veterans classing up the small screen, like Jodie Foster and Billy Crudup. The nomination list runs even deeper with shows (Only Murders in the Building, Fargo, The Crown) built around a who’s who of famous faces. A creative team with a stacked résumé helps, too, as seen in Steven Zaillian’s magnificent, reptilian Ripley, whose impeccable craft earned the limited series a few nominations and its creator a win.
Strong reviews can push certain shows, like Slow Horses and Reservation Dogs, into the race. But mixed and even lousy reviews couldn’t kill the prospects of The Morning Show, a glitzy streaming soap opera about showbiz, which happens to be showbiz’s favorite topic. The sheer volume of new shows being released at all times on an endless supply of platforms has cut into the Emmy habit of just relentlessly honoring the same prime-time institution every year ad nauseam. (The Frasier effect, you might have once dubbed it. Or the Modern Family clause.) This voting group is not immune to the hype of the new, even if it remains susceptible to nostalgia.
In a scattered world of viewing platforms all scrambling for the same eyeballs and subscriber fees, though, it’s FX that seems to be capitalizing most on these shifting definitions of success. That’s not just a matter of giving creative visionaries like Donald Glover, Taika Waititi, and Guillermo del Toro space to develop something ambitious and time to grow a fan base. The network has also fallen almost backward—thanks to Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox—into having various avenues of discovery that cater to both watch-it-live audiences (the advertising for FX shows is among TV’s most enticing) and streaming subscribers getting into the programming through Hulu. Call that the best of both worlds, and an acknowledgment of the nebulous, fractured nature of TV viewership in 2024.
But obviously, it also helps that the shows are just singular. As a supposed comedy with such dramatic appeal, The Bear may have an unfair advantage on Emmy night—apologies to Matt Berry, Tyler James Williams, and Hannah Einbinder, whose more traditional comedic performances were passed over for powerhouse dramatic turns by The Bear’s best. But it’s that very blurring of genre lines—the way it folds an intense workplace melodrama into the half-hour format of a weekly sitcom—that made the show an overnight phenomenon. Meanwhile, Shogun exhibits the kind of feudal complexity, rich character development, and stunning production design that audiences have been seeking since the ignoble decline of Game of Thrones. It’s striking, addictive small-screen mythmaking—and as a drama largely in Japanese, an unprecedented big Emmy winner. Both are successes built for the particular TV landscape and award cycles of today. But you also get the impression that they’d find an audience in any era, with or without the approval of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor based in Chicago. His work has appeared in such publications as The A.V. Club, Vulture, and Rolling Stone. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.