Liza Colón-Zayas and Jeff Hiller, both Emmy winners, stood at the Wolf Theatre inside the Television Academy’s Saban Media Center on Wednesday morning, reading names that would define the next season of television’s most coveted honours. The 78th Primetime Emmy nominations, announced live, immediately crowned two titans: the HBO Max medical drama The Pitt with 25 nods, and the same platform’s comedy Hacks with 24, a record for a comedy series in a single year. The ceremony, set for 14 September at the Peacock Theater, will be hosted by Mariska Hargitay, the first woman to emcee the Emmys in 15 years.

The Pitt, a real-time chronicle of an emergency room shift in Pittsburgh, doubled its previous year’s tally, dominating the acting categories with 13 nominations, just one shy of the record set by Succession. Noah Wyle, already a winner for his portrayal of Dr. Michael Robinavitch, was again nominated for lead actor, while four of the seven supporting actress slots went to his co-stars. Hacks, concluding its fifth and final season, saw Jean Smart vying for a fifth consecutive lead comedy actress Emmy, a feat that would tie her with Cloris Leachman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus for most wins by a female performer. Her co-star Hannah Einbinder, who won her first Emmy last year, received a fifth nomination, as did co-creator Paul W. Downs.

The nominations reflected a streaming landscape in flux. Apple TV+ made a strong showing with the dystopian drama Pluribus (18 nods) and the horror-comedy Widow’s Bay (19), the latter earning a lead actor nod for Matthew Rhys, who also picked up a nomination for the limited series The Beast in Me. Netflix’s anthology Beef led the limited series field with 16 nominations. A rule change this year transformed the variety series category into an “area award,” where multiple programmes can win if they meet a voting threshold, a shift that could reshape the competitive dynamics for late-night staples like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight. Another adjustment quietly retired the term “television movie” in favour of simply “movie,” a nod to the blurring lines between cinema and streaming.

Beyond the numbers, the morning carried poignant undercurrents. Rob Reiner, the actor and filmmaker murdered alongside his wife in their Los Angeles home in December 2025, received a posthumous nomination for guest actor in a comedy for his role in The Bear. Colombian actor Carlos Manuel Vesga earned his first Emmy nod for supporting actor in a drama for Pluribus, a milestone celebrated across Latin American media. Yet the list also revealed absences: the final season of Stranger Things was relegated to technical categories, and Euphoria’s ensemble, save for Zendaya, was overlooked. The Canadian-produced hockey romance Heated Rivalry, a breakout hit on HBO Max, was entirely ineligible because it was financed outside the U.S., a reminder of the Academy’s strict co-production rules.

As the livestream ended, the names hung in the air—a mix of veteran stalwarts and first-time contenders, of records broken and careers memorialised. The Peacock Theater will soon fill with gowns and speeches, but for a moment, the focus remained on a single image: Rob Reiner’s name, called out months after his death, a quiet testament to a life in front of and behind the camera, now etched into an awards season that will unfold without him.