Emmys Will Once Again Pit SNL vs. Late-Night Talkers, But Allow for Multiple Winners

The Emmys are unwinding a rule change that was implemented to solve one problem, but ended up creating another.

The Television Academy announced Wednesday morning that with the reduced number of submissions in Outstanding Scripted Variety Series and Outstanding Talk Series over the past several years, its Board of Governors has voted to merge the two categories into one, Outstanding Variety Series, effective this year.

It was in 2015 that the Academy—given the proliferation of networks and shows, but also in response to some squawking about the weekly Last Week Tonight regularly besting nightly talkers—bifurcated the Outstanding Variety Series category. As of late, though, Outstanding Scripted Variety Series has only pitted Last Week Tonight with John Oliver against Saturday Night Live (and the now-canceled Black Lady Sketch Show), with the former claiming the top prize each of the past three years.

Because of that softer playing field, the Academy is smushing the similar categories back together, returning SNL and Last Week Tonight to the same competitive race as The Late Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Daily Show et al—but allowing for multiple winners.

How does “multiple winners” work? The Academy is reclassifying the Outstanding Variety Series category as an “area award,” which means that nominees will be judged individually on their own merits. “Instead of Emmy voters selecting one nominee to win, voters must answer for each nominee: ‘Does this nominee merit an Emmy? Yes/No,'” the rule-change announcement explains. Any nominee who reaches a 90% “Yes” threshold receives an Emmy, allowing the opportunity for multiple winners in the category. (If no one nominee reaches 90%, the nominee with the highest “Yes” percentage gets the Emmy.)

Drilling down even deeper on the rule change, the merged awards category will be tracked so that nominees are “proportional to the number of submissions received for each format,” Scripted Variety Series vs. Talk Series. Had the categories been merged last year, the number of nominees in both formats would have been the same: two for Scripted Variety, and three for Talk. 

A tracked category also triggers an automatic re-split of the category if there is ever a resurgence in the number of variety programs—meaning, if both formats reach 20 submissions in any given year.