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Sequels can be just as bad as their predecessors, and we’re in the midst of another unfortunate one.
On Monday at the 78th Emmy Awards, in the lead and supporting races for drama and comedy, in addition to lead actor
and actress in a limited series, all 10 actors who crossed the stage came from outside an underrepresented community. The other two, supporting actor and actress in a limited series, which were handed out a week earlier at the Creative Arts ceremonies, shifted off the main show this year in a reshuffling of five categories that drew Hollywood’s guilds’ ire, but did not change the math.
The only performers of color to win an on-camera or voice Emmy this cycle also did so at the Creative Arts. Ernest Harden Jr. won guest actor in a drama for the medical series “The Pitt” on HBO Max, and Octavia Spencer won for narrating “Lost Women of Alaska.”
It should be noted that behind the camera, the comedy directing prize went to Japanese American filmmaker Hiro Murai for Apple TV’s horror comedy “Widow’s Bay,” making him the first Asian director to win the category and only the third Asian director to win an Emmy in any category, after Lee Sung Jin for “Beef” and Hwang Dong-hyuk for “Squid Game.”
By Variety’s count, 17 performers of color were nominated in the lead and supporting acting races this year, down from 28 a year ago, a 39% decline. The figure for actors and hosts of color peaked in 2021 at 49, the last time the field produced #EmmysSoWhite.
Every awards show is at a crossroads. Viewership is sliding, and the industry does not always hear what its audience is telling it. The push for diversity is still meeting hostility in some quarters of Hollywood, especially as it spills into the political sector. Or, worse yet, everyone is willfully misreading what it all means. Awards nights, for better or worse, are when we see these tensions play out in the public square. And believe it, people notice.
Frustration over the absence of winning actors of color is felt across social media, and those voices can be the loudest among the creative community itself. But for the Television Academy, the issue is bound up in the machinery: who among its 20,000-plus members gets to vote on what and how those votes are cast. Layered on top is the “Too Much TV” problem, a field so vast it may be outrunning the voters. Who has the time to weigh all of it?
This year’s ballot drew from 110 drama series, down from 126 in 2025; 71 comedies, up slightly from 69; 31 limited series, down from 33; and 34 television movies, down from 39. The Academy pulled its nominees from 555 program submissions across the 14 program categories, down from 600, a drop of about 7.5%.
The voting body is comprised of roughly 30 peer groups, each representing its own field of expertise, from cinematographers and casting directors to stunt performers, picture editors and sound designers. Performers are one group among them. That structure — who nominates within each discipline and how the full membership settles the winners — shapes the annual outcome as much as any single performance does.
None of this dims the night’s genuine milestones. Matthew Rhys won two lead acting trophies in a single ceremony, for the Netflix limited thriller “The Beast in Me” and the comedy “Widow’s Bay,” becoming the first performer ever to take two lead Emmys in one night. With his 2018 drama win for FX’s “The Americans,” he also became the first man to win in all three lead acting categories.
His limited series victory came at a cost to the diversity ledger. It edged out Oscar Isaac, nominated for “Beef,” who would have become only the third Latino to win the category, after Jharrel Jerome, whose 2019 win for “When They See Us” made him the first Afro-Latino and first Dominican performer to take an acting Emmy, and Raúl Juliá, who won posthumously in 1995 for “The Burning Season.”
It was also a night of sweepers.
Jean Smart won lead comedy actress for “Hacks” for the fifth time, taking the trophy for each of the show’s five seasons and becoming the first woman to achieve the feat. The drama acting races produced four winners from four different series: Noah Wyle for “The Pitt,” Rhea Seehorn for the sci-fi drama “Pluribus,” Tom Pelphrey for the crime thriller “Task and Allison Janney for the politically charged “The Diplomat,” the first such spread since 2022.
Notably, with Janney and Smart each collecting an eighth career acting Emmy, they tied Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Cloris Leachman for the most acting Emmys ever won by a performer.
From that same Peacock stage, Seehorn accepted her drama actress trophy by passing along a line a fellow nominee had mailed her on a card, borrowed from Gloria Steinem, who died this month at 92: “We are linked, not ranked.”
But if we saw more of us ranking more frequently at the top, we could hear that plea more clearly.
Can all this change? Is this the new normal? When will we not see nights like this anymore? Or, better yet, will there be a time when a night like this arises and it won’t sting as much because people of color feel we’re getting a fair and proper shake?
Until then, we look ahead to a future that’s hopefully more inclusive and colorful for us all.
This year’s Emmy nominations were led by “The Pitt” with 25 nominations, followed by “Hacks,” “Widow’s Bay” and “Beef.”
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Variety Awards Circuit: Emmys
