The Emmys Have a John Oliver Problem

On Sunday night, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver took home its tenth consecutive Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series, making it the most-awarded show ever in the category, surpassing The Daily Show’s nine wins.

It also won Outstanding Scripted Variety Series for the third time—a category created three years ago after Oliver had swept Variety Talk Series for seven straight years, another record.

The show’s wins are earned; its mix of comedy and searing insight clearly awes the artists and production people who vote. (It’s also picked up three Peabody Awards, among many others.)

John Oliver has been Secretariat on any track where he’s run.

The reason he was moved out of “talk,” which on paper seemed a better fit, was that LWT doesn’t have guests or interviews. True enough: it’s essentially one man talking. So—talking, yes, but no dialogue. Just monologue.

More significantly, the move followed some reasonable pushback from the nightly late-night shows that LWT was a different animal. No guests, no bands, no couch—and only 30 or so episodes a year, while the nightlies churn out well over four times that.

So for the past three years, LWT has sat in the scripted variety slot, mostly alongside Saturday Night Live. Oliver won as usual in 2023 and 2024. Some thought SNL, riding its 50th season fanfare, might break through this year. Instead, contending with LWT meant eating Secretariat’s dust.

Betting pools on the Emmys should stop taking money in its categories. “Prohibitive favorite” doesn’t go far enough.

But is LWT really a “variety show”? Is it more like SNL than Jimmy Kimmel Live!? Sure, they’re both on weekends and have somewhat closer episode counts (about 20 for SNL).

But one delivers rapid-fire, deeply researched investigative reports—with jokes; the other is the most famous sketch show of all time, a live 90-minute whirl of sketches on elaborate sets, a faux newscast, big-name music acts, and the high-wire thrill of live TV.

So: like, same?

The problem lies with neither LWT nor SNL. It lies with NATAS—the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

The Academy has never known how to honor shows that don’t fit neatly into drama, comedy, series, or movie, and late night has long paid the price.

Consider this: Johnny Carson, firmly on late night’s Mount Rushmore, won only one Emmy directly for his show—in 1992, the year he quit. (He won others when the Academy stuffed him into contrivances like “Special Classification of Outstanding Program Achievement.”)

Carson himself was at least partly to blame. As the Babe Ruth of the genre, he had no peers—and thus no category. So he was often shoved into “variety,” where he lost to one-off specials like Motown 25, The Kennedy Center Honors (twice), and the Tony Awards.

In 1965, he was nominated in “Outstanding Individual Achievement—Actors and Performers,” which had 16 nominees and five winners. He lost to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the Young People’s Concert, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and Barbra Streisand. (Tough crowd.)

After Carson left and late night opened up, variety largely became late night’s turf. David Letterman won a lot. Jay Leno won once. Jon Stewart and The Daily Show won a ton.

But recent years have brought new issues.

Academy rules tie the number of nominees to the number of entries, and the late-night fields have shrunk so much that only three shows even made the cut for Outstanding Talk Series this year, shutting out Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers from contention. Scripted Variety is down to just two nominees: SNL and LWT. Which, by any standard, is silly.

There’s no easy solution, but maybe the clue is in “variety.” The Academy could take it literally—like a variety pack. Create a new category and throw in shows that don’t fit anywhere else.

Why not 60 Minutes? It’s a prime-time show, it draws big audiences, and covers a variety of topics weekly.

In fact, the show it most resembles is probably… Last Week Tonight—minus the comedy (and the umbrage).

If the Academy really wanted to address LWT’s dominance, it could move it to the news Emmys. It wouldn’t be a stretch. The topics are real and pressing. The research is rigorous and impressive. And it often plays like an editorial—or an op-ed.

The news Emmys have a category, “Outstanding News Discussion and Analysis, Editorial and Opinion,” which could use some spark; four of the five nominees this year were from New York Times Opinion video.

It won’t happen, of course. John Oliver is an entertainer in his bones, not a journalist. But it wouldn’t matter anyway. He’s Secretariat. He’d win.

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