The Television Academy spent this summer working to make its own awards smaller. It rebranded the Creative Arts Emmys as Nights 1 and 2 of the 78th Emmy Awards, moved five categories off the televised slate, and parked the results on a September 5 and 6 weekend at the Peacock Theater. Then Bad Bunny walked in and turned Saturday into the best awards show of the year that nobody will see live.
An edited cut of both nights airs on FXX September 12 and lands on Hulu the next day. After that, everyone moves on to the main telecast on NBC September 14. We spent the weekend with the winners lists and the carpet photos. Our conclusion: the weekend the Academy demoted is the one that actually understands what television awards should celebrate.
Night One Belonged to Bad Bunny
Seven wins for The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, including Outstanding Variety Special (Live) along with directing, music direction, choreography and sound mixing. It’s Bad Bunny’s first Emmy, and the sweep pulled his lighting designers, camera operators and mixers into an awards conversation they’ve never occupied. That crossover is the kind of story the main telecast would kill for and won’t get.
The rest of Night One had weight too. The Traitors took six prizes, with Alan Cumming landing a third consecutive hosting win. Mariska Hargitay won twice for My Mom Jayne, her documentary about her mother, taking directing and the nonfiction special. Whatever happens September 14, that’s the win we’ll remember from this weekend.
Jimmy Kimmel added a game show host trophy for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Jeopardy! took outstanding game show, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert stacked five wins. Sabrina Carpenter picked up her first Emmy as producer and performer on The Muppet Show. The EGOT math started before she left the stage, and honestly, we get it. She’s halfway.
Sunday Was for Character Actors, and the Carpet Knew It
Night Two handed out the acting trophies the Academy no longer considers primetime material. Widow’s Bay led everything with eight wins, including Betty Gilpin for a single flashback episode that does more emotional work than most shows manage in a season. A great one-episode turn can reframe a career, the same punch we wrote about with Generations: The Legacy.
DTF St. Louis followed with six wins, including supporting honors for David Harbour and Linda Cardellini. Spider-Noir took five, while The Pitt and Pluribus collected four apiece. Shailene Woodley won a guest acting prize for Paradise.
Then there’s Harbour and Cardellini, and here’s the friction nobody mentioned on that stage. Supporting acting in limited series lived on the NBC telecast for decades before moving to a night with no live broadcast, after the DGA, SAG-AFTRA and WGA pushed back and nominees called the shift a disinvite. Their wins are the case study for what the Academy decided character work is worth: an edited highlight reel on a cable channel three days later.
The carpet told a different story than the seating chart. Julianne Hough, Lisa Rinna, Ariana Madix, Octavia Spencer and Eugene Levy all came through, and presenters included Noah Wyle, Wanda Sykes and Daveed Diggs. The real energy belonged to unscripted television, where Drag Race queens like Kenya Pleaser and Darlene Mitchell pulled the crowds and reality fandoms drove the online volume. Same pattern as the SAMA32 winners we covered: the categories nobody predicts spark the loudest arguments.
One look kept resurfacing in our feed all night. Connor Storrie arrived with a freshly buzzed head and a sharply tailored suit, and the replies collapsed into a single word.
The Two-Tier Emmys Nobody Voted For
Confusion is the quiet cost of all this. All weekend, people asked why their timelines said Nights 1 and 2 when they expected the Creative Arts Emmys. The Academy renamed the event and most viewers never got the memo, so craft winners now compete with a rebrand for attention. Add juried awards for costumes and animation announced back in August, and even the weekend becomes a monthlong rollout.
And still, the work found its audience. Fans celebrated Cumming’s three-peat, tracked the halftime crew’s first statues and turned guest acting wins into their own highlights. The Academy can shrink the stage. It can’t shrink the stakes for the people winning.
So here’s our take going into September 14: watch whether the NBC telecast even acknowledges that Harbour, Cardellini and Gilpin already won. If it doesn’t, the two-tier Emmys stops being a scheduling experiment and becomes a statement about who the Academy thinks its audience comes to see. After this weekend, we think it’s wrong about that.
