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Here are the biggest snubs of the 2025 Emmy nominations
These are the biggest winners and losers of last week's Emmy nominations.
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The 2025 Emmy nominations were announced last week, serving as a brief reminder during a summer of reruns that there was a lot of great television to be watched last year.
In fact, there may have been too many great shows last year, if the nominees are any indication. I did pretty well on my Emmy predictions, but there were several shows surprisingly left on the outside looking in.
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I’ll dive into some more specific analysis below, but my biggest takeaway is that in an oversaturated TV landscape, voters gravitated toward the biggest and brightest shows, leaving underseen masterpieces on the outside.
2025 Emmy nominations: Winners, losers, biggest snubs
Winners
Apple TV+: America’s foremost consumer electronic company is also the current king of television – or at least of running successful awards campaigns. “Severance” led all shows with 27 nominations, while “The Studio” was tops among comedies with 23 nods.
Movie stars: It used to be that the Golden Globes were the awards show most known for nominating A-List celebrities for any conceivable award, regardless of performance quality. This year, the Emmys nominated 5 different celebrities in the Guest Actor/Actress categories — Dave Franco, Ron Howard, Zoë Kravitz, Anthony Mackie, and Martin Scorsese — for playing themselves in “The Studio.” How about some performances requiring a bit of range next time?
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HBO Max: Apple TV+ may have grabbed the headlines, but HBO almost always leads the total number of nominations, and did so again this year with 142.
Losers
Prime Video: Jeff Bezos’ billion-dollar bet on “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” has not panned out, with the epic series earning just one nomination for its second season. Comparing Prime to HBO or Netflix is unfair based on how many shows they release. But in the battle of consumer giants turned streamers, Apple TV+ (79 nominations) trounced Prime (12).
FX/Hulu: If you add up the Emmy nominations of various Disney-owned properties, the House of Mouse comes out looking OK. But its marquee TV channel (FX) and streamer (Hulu) took a hit this year, with “The Bear” dipping in total nominations and shows like “The Handmaid’s Tale” missing out on major awards. “Shogun” Season 2 can’t come soon enough.
The little guys: Megacorporations dominated the proceedings, and channels or streamers not owned by a company worth more than $100 billion suffered. AMC got fewer nominations (two) than Mark Zuckerberg’s META (three), for crying out loud.
Snubs
Diego Luna, Genevieve O’Reilly: You could probably put all of “Andor” in the loser category, despite the show’s 14 nominations. The best show of 2025 deserved so much more, with Luna’s titular performance and O’Reilly’s carefully calibrated turn as Mon Mothma particularly egregious omissions.
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Edi Patterson: Of all the “The Righteous Gemstones” performances that deserved recognition, Edi Patterson’s vulgar, petulant Judy Gemstone stands out, particularly in the show’s fourth and final season. Walton Goggins as Uncle Baby Billy was another miss by the Television Academy, but at least the actor got rewarded for “The White Lotus.”
“Say Nothing”: FX/Hulu’s limited series, based on Dorchester native Patrick Radden Keefe’s book on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, got one measly nomination. One of the most engrossing shows of 2024 deserved so much more.
Play or Skip
Press play on these movies and shows:
“Dept. Q”: I’m late to the party on this one, but this Scottish crime drama from Scott Frank (“The Queen’s Gambit”) features something I love: An early-season moment that completely recalibrates your expectations for the show. Something else I love: Kelly Macdonald, who plays the therapist of the protagonist (Mathew Goode), a curmudgeonly detective returning from a near-death shooting. (Netflix)
“Dexter: Resurrection”: Shockingly, Showtime has found new life in Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), even after eight seasons, a sequel (“New Blood”) and a prequel (“Original Sin”). “Resurrection,” which puts the serial killer with a code in New York City, recaptures the madcap fun that fueled its earliest seasons. (Paramount+)
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“The Straight Story” (1999): Deep in the recesses of Disney+’s cavernous streaming library is this delightful David Lynch film, inspired by the true story of a man who rode a lawnmower 240 miles across Iowa and Wisconsin to see his ailing brother. Describing what this film means to me would take far more space than this newsletter provides, but I went deep over on Letterboxd. (Disney+)
But go ahead and skip this one:
“Countdown”: Formulaic and predictable aren’t always a bad thing: Take the “Law & Order” franchise, a comfort watch for millions of Americans who find fictional murder and sex crimes relaxing. Despite its ambitions, “Countdown,” created by Derek Haas (“Chicago Fire,” “Chicago Med”) is the bad kind of formulaic predictable, telling a story of police and corruption so dull that it slid off my brain the second I stopped watching. (Prime Video)
End Credits
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Until next time, good stream hunting, everyone!
— Kevin
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