The Emmys Aren’t Going Anywhere

Photo: Variety via Getty Images

If recent ratings trends hold up, tonight’s strike-postponed Emmys on Fox will be lucky to reach more than 6 million viewers and may well end up the least-watched ever. Given the overall collapse of linear TV audiences in the past decade — and the even worse tune-in decline for awards shows — nobody in Hollywood will be surprised by such an outcome. But while the Emmys ceremony has never been more culturally irrelevant, industry insiders say the golden-winged statuette remains as coveted as ever among creatives and the executives who employ them.

At last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys, Peacock won its first-ever Emmys, with Poker Face and The Traitors picking up honors in the creative arts categories. Within hours, the streamer made sure subscribers knew: Each show got moved up to Peacock’s top-of-page content carousel, with new copy triumphantly touting the shows as Emmy recipients. Other streamers get similarly amped about the awards, devoting entire content rows to their platform’s respective nominees and winners.

Some of this is about bragging, but insiders think awards recognition helps with content discovery. “The more people hear about your shows in lots of different ways,� says one veteran marketing exec, “the more likely it is they’re going to recall those shows and watch them on the platform.� Though the number of new titles getting green-lit has started to decline from Peak TV highs, the sheer tonnage remains high enough that any tool that can connect a title to an audience is seen as useful. “If you can win an Emmy, that’s still more press you’re able to get than if you don’t win an Emmy,� says Richard Rushfield, columnist at the industry newsletter The Ankler. “If you’re a show looking to break through, it’s of great value.�

At various points over the last 30 years, individual networks and streaming services used their Emmy haul to bolster their overall branding. HBO, of course, led the way in the 1990s and early aughts, leaning on its regular dominance of awards season to tout its status as something superior to ordinary television. (“It’s not TV. It’s HBO.�) FX used Emmy love for The Shield to redefine what a basic cable network could be, while AMC similarly relied on Mad Men and Breaking Bad to shed its image as a bargain-basement Turner Classic Movies. Netflix and, briefly, Amazon’s Prime Video followed a similar playbook when they started making original shows a decade ago, while most recently Apple TV+ has gone down the prestige TV path in the hope that the halo effect from Emmys (and Oscars) will translate into subscribers. “We definitely saw people coming in and trying to claim the quality mantle,� one veteran TV exec says. “A lot of streamers were new to the Hollywood ecosystem and wanted to send a message, and Emmys is one way that’s recognized. It’s nice validation.�

And yet quality, at least as measured by Emmy wins, is not enough of a business model for most streamers. While HBO proper is still all in on the prestige model, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery is betting on breadth of offering, designing Max to woo audiences who don’t care what critics or Emmy voters think. Disney is still letting FX aim high with its development slate, but overall, Hulu and Disney+ seem focused on finding blockbusters rather than making year-end lists. Even Netflix doesn’t seem nearly as obsessive over its Emmy tally as it was a few years ago. “When Netflix first came on the scene, they wanted to win Emmys to break through,� the longtime TV exec explains. “But now that they’ve become so much bigger, I think they’ve accepted their role as the world’s basic cable channel. That is actually a great place to be financially, but when you accept that, you probably don’t care as much about Emmys.�

The key words in that last sentence, however, are “as much.� Even if the biggest and oldest streamers aren’t as thirsty for Emmys as they were five or ten years ago, the exhaustive and expensive FYC campaigns they continue to wage suggest they still care quite a bit. And that brings us to what may be the fundamental factor behind the Emmys’ enduring cache: ego. “This is an industry based on vanity and recognition of craft; of course the industry still cares about the Emmys,� says one communications exec well versed in the art of managing self-esteem among Hollywood honchos. One top producer agrees, noting, “for someone who is on a television program, it is still a huge honor to win an Emmy. It still matters to the community.� And Rushfield, who’s made a career chronicling the town’s psyches, argues its need for awards validation really is not some unique character flaw among the showbiz elite. “You walk into any room and say, ‘Okay, I’ve got a prize: best person in this room wins’ — and everyone goes for it,� he says. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what the prize is. Oh, I want to be certified the best person walking down Bundy right now! — that basic human instinct can never just ignore a prize.�

Perhaps, but while everyone wants a pat on the back, most people aren’t able to convince their bosses to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in pursuit of such accolades. The rules are different in Hollywood — or have been until now — in part because places like Netflix and HBO and Apple are forever competing to get artists to bring them their best projects. Check size generally matters most, along with marketing budgets, but the creatives who make Emmy-worthy TV also consider how hard a particular platform will work to get them nominated. “The Emmys matter to networks because the Emmys matter to talent,� the veteran marketing exec says. “They want to work at networks where they can advance their careers. Getting awards recognition is an important part of that.�

And as ridiculous as Emmy spending might seem — particularly in an era of cost-cutting at every streamer — Rushfield argues it’s just part of doing business in Hollywood. “It’s just one of the ways to make the talent happy,� he says. “There are maybe 25 showrunners that every service would kill to have. Telling them, ‘Oh, we don’t care about Emmys and we’re not going to spend any money to try to get you one’ is not a selling point to get them on your team.� The talent-maintenance factor can’t be underestimated: An awards show as scandal-plagued as the Golden Globes only manages to survive in a new form because key figures in the movie-star-making machine didn’t want to give up a vital source of industry self-congratulation. The Emmys, at least, are still generally respected.

However, a correction in spending for TV awards may be imminent. With fewer shows getting made, and the very real possibility that we’ll soon see fewer stand-alone streaming platforms, the competition for top talent might become less intense than it was a half-decade ago. And with that adjustment, streamers might start rethinking exactly how much money they put into awards and where that money goes. Because of last summer’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, some of the in-person events that usually took place during Emmy season disappeared or were scaled back. It’ll be interesting to see if that forces any long-term changes to campaigning — there are certainly some execs praying it might. Plus, now that streamers like Netflix are starting to be more transparent about how many people watch their shows, some creators may have their needs for positive reinforcement met by ratings rather than kudos. “People who make television shows are artists, and they want their work validated. But it’s not the only thing that matters,� the TV exec says. “Some people just want to have their stuff seen.�