Here we are, at another Emmy season, with all the campaigning, candidacies and canapés a human could possibly want.
It seems like it was just Emmy season last year. And yet a full 12 months have gone by, bringing with them a giant new slate of contenders. (Well, not as giant as it could be, but more on that in a second.)
You may not fully feel the awards season vibes with the state of the world so tenuous and the state of TV … not much better. Fears of automation, contraction and general diminution abound everywhere. Not to mention the prospect of AI engulfing physical sets and/or writers rooms, as The Comeback savagely portrayed this season.
At the television upfronts in New York City in mid-May, legacy networks like NBC, CBS and HBO were lapped by Amazon and YouTube — when they were there at all. The event made clear that TV is tech companies’ world now and, more to the point, often content creators’ world; the YouTube presentation, with its Jessers and its Alex Coopers, was the talk of the week.
Yes, the state of scripted television can seem as bleak as a plotline from Breaking Bad, which, come to think of it, feels so very long ago. And the numbers back up that outlook: After hitting a peak of nearly 1,700 original series in 2022, the total number plunged to barely 1,100 in 2025 — a drop of nearly a third. But that doesn’t mean quality can’t be found. We’re just drawing from an increasingly shallow pool.
