And the 2026 Emmy nominees for best variety series are… The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live! In other words, the five shows The Hollywood Reporter (and probably you) predicted.
So the Television Academy voters went chalk, which left out dark-horse candidate Hot Ones — the viral Sean Evans-hosted talk show could have been the first YouTube series ever nominated in the category. Maybe next year. It was not all a yawn, however: the Emmy Awards‘ variety series category itself has a new look this year.
For the past decade, the variety series category was the variety series … categories, with scripted and talk separated. Not anymore. The TV Academy’s consolidation, announced in January, followed a years-long decline in the number of series submitted in the best scripted variety series and best variety talk series categories. The current setup — one variety show to rule them all — is how the Emmys operated prior to a 2015 rule change. More or less.
The type of variety submission — scripted variety series or talk series — informed the number of nominees today in the unified category. In other words, the nods are proportional to the number of submissions received for each format.
