Emmy voting is now closed, and not a moment too soon.
Every year, more than 27,000 members of the Television Academy — actors and editors, showrunners and composers, the people who actually make television — sit down with their ballots and decide who walks away with an Emmy. And every year, almost none of them will tell us, on the record, what they really think.
So, like we do with Oscar voters, we reached out to a few of them ourselves.
In the final days of voting for the 78th Emmy Awards, Variety spoke with dozens of Academy members across the organization’s 31 professional peer groups — the specialty divisions that sort the membership by craft, from performers to picture editors — and promised each of them anonymity in exchange for total candor. What we saw was a very small snapshot of where the race could go when awards are handed out across the first two weekends in September.
Every voter was also asked the same four questions off the ballot — their biggest snub, the most overspent FYC campaign, the network or streamer having the best season and the one win that would actually move the business. Their answers close each entry.
