The 2026 Emmy nominations landed on July 8, and as always, the real story isn’t just who got in. It’s who finally broke through, and who got left standing outside. This year’s list is unusually good on both counts.
The Breakouts Nobody Saw Coming
Apple TV+’s Widow’s Bay emerged as one of the two biggest breakout shows of the past year, landing 19 nominations total, including acting nods for Matthew Rhys, Stephen Root, Dale Dickey, and Kate O’Flynn, a RADA-trained character actress who’s been quietly great in British stage and screen work for over a decade before this role finally gave her a real breakout.
Then there’s Chase Infiniti, who went from being a kickboxing instructor in Chicago to an awards-circuit fixture after Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, and turned that momentum into a Best Drama Actress nomination for The Testaments, the only acting nomination that Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel series picked up in its first season.
Sarah Pidgeon earned a Lead Actress nomination for playing Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in Ryan Murphy’s Love Story, which became the most-watched series in FX and Hulu’s history, a genuinely massive result for a limited series built around one of the most scrutinized real-life romances of the last 30 years.
And Marvel Television finally got some Emmy love: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II picked up a Lead Actor in a Comedy Series nomination for Wonder Man, the first acting nomination for a Marvel TV project in five years.
The Snubs Everyone’s Talking About
Not everyone who deserved a nomination got one. Lili Reinhart delivered one of the best performances of the year as a codependent twin sibling in MUBI’s limited series Hal & Harper, but was left off the Lead Actress in a Limited Series list entirely. Industry went into its final season with strong work from Ken Leung as Eric Tao and Kit Harington, and walked away with a complete shutout, nothing, across any category, for a show that’s been part of the awards conversation before.
Why This Year’s List Hits Different
What ties the breakouts together is that none of them came out of nowhere by accident. O’Flynn, Infiniti, Pidgeon, and Abdul-Mateen II all did years of unglamorous work (in O’Flynn and Pidgeon’s cases, largely on stage) before landing the role that made the industry pay attention. We’ve put together full profiles on each of them, how they got here, and what’s next.