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The Emmys are confusing this year, so here's a guide to what is and isn't eligible
We pull back the curtain on Emmy eligibility and explain why the seasons you’d think are up for awards just … aren’t.
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We pull back the curtain on Emmy eligibility and explain why the seasons you’d think are up for awards just … aren’t.
Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images
Here we sit in January 2024 and the Emmys are nigh — the ceremony that should have taken place in September was postponed due to the Hollywood strikes. Now, some of the Emmy contenders you’ll see Monday night aired well over a year ago – as far back as June 2022. How, exactly, did that happen? Skip ahead to see what’s eligible in outstanding drama and comedy. Or, gather ’round for a little history:
Some of us are old enough to remember a time before streaming, before cable, when there were just the three television networks. Back then, during the Cretaceous, as ichthyosaurs swam the turbid seas, there was a system that every network followed: Television series premiered in the fall and had their season finales in the spring; the summer was given over to reruns.
From the mid-1970s on, the Emmys ceremony always took place in late August/early September, which made sense – they were, after all, largely a promotional tool to herald the new television season by honoring the one that came before. They were part of the hype surrounding the networks’ launches of their new fall line-ups, which used to be surprisingly glitzy affairs, replete with earwormingly cheesy theme songs.
But then came cable, and streaming, and the gradual phasing out of the hoary 22-episode season, even on broadcast networks. Today, television seasons start and end at will, yet the Television Academy has maintained a white-knuckle grip on the Old Ways: The Emmys ceremony takes place in September, and it honors shows that aired in the window between the start of summer of the previous year and the spring of the current one.
Other awards that honor television make it simpler. The Golden Globes ceremony, for example, takes place in January, and any television show that aired any time in the previous calendar year is eligible.
As prestige streaming services started lapping up greater and greater shares of Emmys, the Television Academy’s antiquated adherence to the notion of a September ceremony made it difficult to keep track of which seasons of a streaming series were eligible in any given year.
This year, that confusion is compounded by the fact that the Hollywood strikes caused the Academy to delay the Emmys ceremony. For the first time since the 1950s, Emmys will be handed out in January – this Monday night, in fact.
Yet the Emmys’ eligibility window hasn’t changed. This year’s ceremony will only honor shows that aired between June 1, 2022 and May 31, 2023. That’s a long time ago, and it means that several nominated shows have had time to produce and air full seasons beyond the ones that are currently nominated.
Given all that, it’ll be useful, come Monday night, to keep straight which specific seasons and which performances are actually in the running. So here’s a handy guide.
Outstanding drama series
Andor, Season 1, Disney+
This one’s easy – we’re talking the first and only season (so far) of Andor, the Star Wars series that eschewed lightsabers, lore and lyricism for a refreshingly grounded tale of rebellion, sabotage, incarceration and (most marvelously!) the petty office politics that drive the engine of the evil Galactic Empire.
Better Call Saul, Season 6, Part 2, AMC
For those of us, like me, who’d prematurely resigned ourselves to a world where Better Call Saul ended without the Emmys ever recognizing the outstanding work of Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn, good news. The series intentionally divided its sixth and final season so that its last six episodes would air during this ceremony’s eligibility window. So we’re talking about the episodes that take place in the immediate aftermath of a major character’s death, and that portray the resolution of the Nebraska flash-forward, involving a hilarious mall heist, and Saul Goodman’s final fate. That means those of us who’ve been pulling for this show and these actors for years are gonna get still another chance to get our hearts broken one last time.
The Crown, Season 5, Netflix
Take note: We’re not dealing with the most recent, bifurcated final season, but the one before it, which introduced a new raft of cast members, most notably Imelda Staunton’s Elizabeth, Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana and Dominic West’s Charles. The season mostly tracked the implosion of the Charles-Diana marriage; it ended with the handover of Hong Kong and the ascension of Tony Blair. (Last weekend, Debicki’s performance as Diana won her the Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama — but that award was for her work in the first half of the show’s final season. Got it? Still with me?)
House of the Dragon, Season 1, HBO/Max
Again, no confusion here: This is the only season of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel that’s aired so far. All those characters with their irritatingly similar names (Rhaenys! Rhaenyra!), all those dragons, all those ghastly kids being even ghastlier jerks to each other. The series is a huge investment for HBO/Max, so the execs will be looking for some love Monday night. (It’s probably churlish to note the conspicuous absence, in these nominations, of another hugely expensive fantasy series from another major streaming service, so let’s just give Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power some time alone to lick its wounds.)
The Last of Us, Season 1, HBO/Max
This twisty fungus-among-us post-apocalyptic series has only aired its first season, but that season was meaty as a portobello. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey are in the running, and Nick Offerman took home the Emmy for guest actor in a drama category for his heartbreaking work in episode 3.
Succession, Season 4, HBO/Max
The series’ turbulent and triumphant final season ended juuuust under the wire. That surprising character death, and all the venal, grasping, desperate jockeying for position it kicked into motion, all took place during the Emmy eligibility window: The series finale aired on May 28 of last year, and the window closed just three days later; they knew what they were doing. Brian Cox gets his one last shot at an Emmy for the role of Logan Roy, but he’s up against fellow actors Kieran Culkin (who hasn’t won for his portrayal of Roman Roy) and Jeremy Strong (who took home an Emmy for his performance as Kendall Roy back in 2020).
The White Lotus, Season 2, HBO/Max
Yes, this is Season 2 – the Italy season. Sex workers, Vespas, villas, “These gays are trying to murder me,” the whole sun-baked Sicilian schmear. Pretty much the entire ensemble cast is up for acting Emmys; root against Jennifer Coolidge at your peril.
Yellowjackets, Season 2, Showtime
The furious (you’ll forgive me) buzz around this time-hopping series cooled a bit in its second season, which earned it fewer Emmy nominations. But Melanie Lynskey’s fearless and funny performance as a survivor of a group of athletes stranded in the Canadian wilderness years before earned her her second Emmy nom for the role.
Outstanding comedy series
Abbott Elementary, Season 2, ABC
This raft of nominations are for the show’s sophomore season. The show’s first season earned it a win for outstanding writing for a comedy series, outstanding casting for a comedy series, and a win for Sheryl Lee Ralph. It’s up for all three of those again, along with repeat acting noms for creator Quinta Brunson, Janelle James and Ralph. New this year: acting nominations for guest Taraji P. Henson and series regular Tyler James Williams.
Barry, Season 4, HBO/Max
Barry’s fourth and final season just beat the eligibility buzzer: Its harrowing/hilarious final episode aired three days before the window closed. This is the season where everything catches up to Barry at last, even as he escapes prison, and lives off the grid before returning to LA for a final reckoning.
The Bear, Season 1, FX
Cast your mind back, back to June of 2022, when all of a sudden your most TV-savvy friends started talking about this riveting, funny, stressful show about a sandwich place in Chicago. It’s hard to remember, now that The Bear is widely considered one of the best shows on television, what it was like to discover how raw and real and refreshing it was back then. But Monday night is the first chance the Emmys will have to recognize this show – all of the nominations are for Season 1, when it was still a scrappy underdog that could all too easily have disappeared into the glut of the cable grid. Rest assured: There will come a time for Season 2’s brilliant, cameo-studded Christmas dinner episode to receive its due – but that’s next year’s concern. This is the first chance The Bear‘s stars, writers, directors and producers will be able to step into the Emmy spotlight.
Jury Duty, Season 1, FreeVee
This one’ll be easy to keep straight. There’s only been one season of this fake reality series that cast a good-natured real guy as a jury member, surrounded him with actors, and had him sit through a fake trial. It’s hugely unlikely that a second season is even possible, now that the game’s been revealed.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 5, Prime Video
The fifth and final season of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s profile of a fictional female comic took real chances, offering teasing flash-forwards that threw the show’s (too-comfortable) status quo into disarray. In the main storyline, meanwhile, Midge got a writing gig on a talk show, and chafed against its demands. The Emmys showered the show with awards in its opening seasons; it remains to be seen if the series’ gratifying willingness to shake things up in the home stretch will turn their heads again.
Only Murders in the Building, Season 2, Hulu
Don’t get it twisted – these nominations aren’t for the most recent season of Hulu’s comedy mystery series, which widened out the world of the show into musical theater, and featured guest stars Paul Rudd and Meryl Streep. No, we’re talking about Season 2, which stuck to the murderous goings-on within the tony Upper West Side apartment building referenced in the title. RIP Bunny.
Ted Lasso, Season 3, AppleTV+
The third and final season may have its detractors, and the show never recaptured the cultural cachet it enjoyed when it debuted, but never mind. Season 3 has got plenty of chances to win something Monday night. It alone ate up half of the slots in the guest actress in a comedy series category, though that award ended up going to Judith Light for her work in Poker Face.
Wednesday, Season 1, Netflix
A huge hit that likely owed more to star Jenna Ortega’s pitch-perfect deadpan delivery and less to its setting (another school for outcasts) or its plotting (a clunky love triangle). But a hit it was, and it stands poised to soak up a lot of Emmy love on Monday night, albeit mostly for technical awards.
Actor Peter Greene at a press conference in New York City in 2010.
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Actor Peter Greene, known for playing villains in movies including Pulp Fiction and The Mask, has died. Greene was found dead in his apartment in New York City on Friday, his manager and friend, Gregg Edwards, told NPR. The cause of death was not immediately provided. He was 60 years old.
The tall, angular character actor’s most famous bad guy roles were in slapstick and gritty comedies. He brought a hammy quality to his turn as Dorian Tyrell, Jim Carrey’s nemesis in the 1994 superhero movie The Mask, and, that same year, played a ruthless security guard with evil elan in the gangster movie Pulp Fiction.
“Peter was one of the most brilliant character actors on the planet,” Edwards said.
He went on to work steadily, earning dozens of credits in movies and on TV, such as the features Judgment Night, Blue Streak and Training Day, a 2001 episode of Law & Order, and, in 2023, an episode of The Continental, the John Wick prequel series.
At the time of his death, the actor was planning to co-narrate the in-progress documentary From the American People: The Withdrawal of USAID, alongside Jason Alexander and Kathleen Turner. “He was passionate about this project,” Edwards said.
Greene was also scheduled to begin shooting Mickey Rourke’s upcoming thriller Mascots next year.
Rourke posted a close-up portrait of Greene on his Instagram account Friday night accompanied by a prayer emoji, but no words. NPR has reached out to the actor’s representatives for further comment.
Peter Greene was born in New Jersey in 1965. He started pursuing acting in his 20s, and landed his first film role in Laws of Gravity alongside Edie Falco in 1992.
The actor battled drug addiction through much of his adult life. But according to Edwards, Greene had been sober for at least a couple of years.
Edwards added that Greene had a tendency to fall for conspiracy theories. “He had interesting opinions and we differed a lot on many things,” said Edwards. “But he was loyal to a fault and was like a brother to me.”
Acute solution
The method sometimes works for triangular prisms too. Measuring the height of the triangle at the end of the prism packaging, doubling it and adding it to the overall length of the box gives you the perfect length of paper to cut to cover its triangular ends with paper three times for a flawless finish.
To wrap a tube of sweets or another cylindrical gift with very little waste, measure the diameter (width) of the circular end and multiply it by Pi (3.14…) to find the amount of paper needed to encircle your gift with wrap. Then measure the length of the tube and add on the diameter of one circle to calculate the minimum length of paper needed. Doing this should mean the paper meets exactly at the centre of each circular end of the gift requiring one small piece of tape to secure it. But it’s best to allow a little extra paper to ensure the shape is completely covered or risk spoiling the surprise.
Circling back
If you have bought anyone a ball, then woe – spheres are arguably the hardest shape to wrap. It’s impossible to cover a ball smoothly using a piece of paper, not only because the properties of paper stop it from being infinitely bendable, but because of the hairy ball theorem, says Sophie Maclean, a maths communicator and PhD student at King’s College London. The theorem explains it is impossible to comb hair on a ball or sphere flat without creating at least one swirl or cowlick.
“If you think about putting wrapping paper round a ball, you’re not going to be able to get it smooth all the way round,” says Maclean. “There’s going to have to be a bump or gap at some point. Personally, I quite like being creative with wrapping and this is where I would embrace it. Tie a bow around it or twist the paper to get a Christmas cracker or a present that looks like a sweet.”
If paper efficiency is your goal when wrapping a football, you may want to experiment with a triangle of foil. An international team of scientists studied how Mozartkugel confectionery – spheres of delicious marzipan encased in praline and coated in dark chocolate – are wrapped efficiently in a small piece of foil. They observed that minimising the perimeter of the shape reduces waste, making a square superior to a rectangle of foil with the same area.
Krampuses take part in the annual Krampuslauf or “Krampus Run” on the evening of the Feast of St. Nicholas in the Austrian city of Salzburg. The tradition is centuries-old in the eastern parts of the European Alps.
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SALZBURG, Austria — As you approach Salzburg’s Max Aicher Stadium on the eve of the feast of St. Nicholas, you’d be forgiven if you thought that, from a distance, there appeared to be a Chewbacca convention underway. As you got closer, though, you’d realize the few hundred mostly men dressed in furry brown costumes were not from a galaxy, far, far away, but had instead assembled for a far more traditional, Earth-bound reason: to play, en masse, the alpine character of Krampus, the monstrous horned devilish figure who, according to custom in this part of Europe, accompanies St. Nicholas as he visits children and assesses their behavior from the past year. While St. Nick rewards the good boys and girls, his hairy, demonic sidekick punishes the bad children.
“It’s basically a good cop, bad cop arrangement,” says Alexander Hueter, self-proclaimed Überkrampus of Salzburg’s annual Krampus Run, an event when hundreds of Krampuses are let loose throughout the old town of Salzburg, where they terrorize children, adults, and anyone within the range of a swat from their birch branch switches they carry.
Members of Krampus clubs throughout Austria and the German state of Bavaria gather at a local soccer stadium to change into their Krampus costumes.
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When asked to explain why people in this part of Europe take part in this centuries-old tradition, Hueter skips the centuries of Roman, Pagan and early Christian history that, together, morphed into the legend of the Krampus figure and instead cuts straight to the chase: entertainment.
“If St. Nicholas comes to town on his own, it’s nice,” says Hueter with a polite smile, “but there’s no excitement. No tension. I mean, St. Nick is all well and good, but at the end of the day, people want to see something darker. They want to see Krampus.”
And if it’s Krampus they want, it’s Krampus they’ll get, says Roy Huber, who’s come across the border from the German state of Bavaria to take part in this year’s Krampus Run. “The rest of the year, I feel like a civilian,” Huber says with a serious face, “but when the winter comes, you have the feeling under your skin. You are ready to act like a Krampus.”
Huber stands dressed in a coffee-colored yak and goat hair costume holding his mask which has a scar along the left side of its face, two horns sticking out of the scalp, and a beautifully waxed mustache that makes his monstrous avatar look like a Krampus-like version of the 1970s Major League Baseball closer Rollie Fingers.
Roy Huber, from Bavaria, holds his Krampus mask prior to the Krampus Run. “When the winter comes, you get the feeling to be Krampus,” he says.
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Behind Huber stands a Krampus with a red face and several horns that make up a mohawk. Benny Sieger is the man behind this punk version of a Krampus, and he says children are especially scared of his get-up.
“Very scared,” he says, “but if I act like a sensitive Krampus, it can go well. In fact, our hometown Krampus club hosts an event called ‘Cuddle a Krampus’ to ensure that we are not so scary.”
Sieger, though, says he shows no mercy for young adults, especially young men, who he says “are basically asking to be hit” if they come to a Krampus run. He shows off a long switch made up of birch tree branches that smarts like a bee sting when hit with it.
Normally Nicklaus Bliemslieder would be one of those young adults asking for it at the Krampus run — he’s 19 years old — but his mother boasts of how her son gamed the system by playing a Krampus for 14 years straight since he was 5 years old.
“I was never scared of being a Krampus,” he says, “but I was scared of the Krampus. The first time I put the mask on, I wasn’t scared anymore.”
Blieslieder, Siger, Huber and dozens of other Krampuses pile onto a row of city buses that will take them to Salzburg’s old town, singing soccer songs on the way to rile themselves up. In the town center, they put their masks on, the bus doors swing open, and dozens of Krampuses empty into the streets of downtown Salzburg, lunging at shoppers, swatting them with switches, their cowbells a-clanging. At the front of the procession dressed in a white and gold robe is St. Nicholas, holding a staff, handing out candy with a serene smile, and blissfully oblivious of the cacophony of blood-curdling chaos behind him.
After a city bus drops off more than 200 Krampuses at the entrance to the old town of Salzburg, the Krampuses start to put their masks on and get into character.
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Salzburg resident Rene Watziker watches the Krampuses go by, his 4 1/2 year-old son Valentin perched on his shoulders, his head buried into the back of his father’s neck, and his oversized mittens covering his eyes in terror. As Valentin shakes in fear, his father tries to coax him out of it — unsuccessfully.
“He’s too scared of the Krampuses,” says Watziker, laughing. “This is great, though, because this is my childhood memory, too. I want him to have the same good memories of his childhood. He’s going to look at the video I’m shooting and then he’ll be very proud he came.”
Salzburg resident Rene Watziker watches the Krampuses go by, but his four-and-a-half year-old son Valentin perched is too scared to look at them.
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Further down the pedestrian street, Krampuses hit onlookers with handfuls of branches and smear tar on people’s faces. Onlooker Sabeine Gruber, here with her 13-year-old daughter, manages to crack a smile at the spectacle, but she says the Krampus Run has gotten tamer with time. She points to the stickers on the backs of these Krampuses exhibiting numbers in case you want to complain that a particular Krampus hit you too hard.
“When I was a child,” says Gruber, “this was far worse. You were beaten so hard that you woke up the next day with blue welts on your legs. These days the Krampus run is more like a petting zoo.”
Esme Nicholson contributed reporting.
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