With final-round voting for the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards now underway, TV Academy members are being asked to do something unusual in Outstanding Variety Series: not pick a winner.
Or at least, not pick only one.
As we’ve reported, this year’s newly recombined category is being treated as an area award. Voters will not simply choose one winner from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and The Daily Show. They will vote yes or no on whether each nominee deserves an Emmy.
Any nominee that gets 90% yes votes wins, meaning as many as five shows could win—an outcome the Academy says it’s preparing for. If nobody hits 90%, the Emmy goes to the show with the highest yes-vote total.
So how likely is more than one winner?
The Case for One Winner
This is still the safest bet, for two reasons.
First, 90% is a high bar. It is not “most voters liked it.” It is near-consensus that a show deserves an Emmy. Even in a category full of familiar names, getting nine out of ten voters to agree on anything is asking a lot.
Second, this is not how TV Academy members are used to thinking about a marquee Emmy category.
Area awards are not new to the Primetime Emmys; in fact, they’re relatively common among the craft categories judged by peer groups. But Outstanding Variety Series is different. This is a major program category being put before the full Television Academy, which means many voters will be encountering this kind of yes/no Emmy ballot for the first time.
That could matter. A voter with a rooting interest in one of the five nominees may still treat the category like a traditional race, even if the rules do not require it. If they believe The Late Show should win, they may vote yes for The Late Show and no for everyone else. Same for Last Week Tonight, SNL, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, or The Daily Show.
The ballot gives voters permission to be generous. It does not guarantee they will be.
The Case for Two
This is where things get interesting.
A two-winner result could come down less to Emmy math than to Emmy politics. And this year, two shows in particular have strong “take a stand” cases.
Last year’s Outstanding Talk Series winner The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is in its final Emmy cycle after CBS’s decision to end the show. That alone gives it a farewell-season narrative, but the cancellation turned Colbert into a larger industry cause célèbre—helped along by widespread speculation that CBS parent Paramount was looking to curry favor with a Trump administration that had long seen Colbert as a thorn in its side.
Then there’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Kimmel’s six-day suspension last September, followed by his return and continued battles with Trump and the FCC, gave his show its own political charge.
Emmy voters, famously, are not allergic to a statement vote. In a year when late night itself has been at the center of political and corporate pressure, Colbert and Kimmel may be the two clearest “take a stand” options on the entire Emmy ballot.
The Case for Three
Then there is John Oliver.
If Last Week Tonight is the third wheel in a multi-winner scenario, it is not exactly an underdog crashing the party. Oliver’s HBO series has swept the program awards in its lane for 10 years straight, first in Variety Talk, then in Scripted Variety after the Academy moved it there. (It has also won Outstanding Writing in a Variety Series ten years straight.)
In other words, the argument for three is simple: even if voters are emotionally and/or politically attuned to Colbert and Kimmel, Last Week Tonight remains Last Week Tonight. It has spent a decade training Emmy voters to say yes.
That is what makes a three-winner result unlikely but not absurd. It would require an unusually generous electorate, yes. But the third show would not have to be some long-shot beneficiary of category confusion. It could be the show Emmy voters already know how to reward.
The Case for Four or Five
Four or five winners would be highly uncommon, and likely destabilizing enough to send the rulebook back into committee. But it is not completely without precedent for the Emmys to let a major category crown a crowd.
At the 17th Emmy Awards in 1965, Academy president Rod Serling scrapped the usual head-to-head structure and collapsed 27 categories into four sprawling “area” categories covering entertainment programs, entertainment individuals, and their news/documentary counterparts. Each of those categories held as many as 23 nominees. With the one-winner rule gone, the Academy handed out multiple Emmys within the same broad fields, including four winners in the top program category and five in the performers category.
That experiment was fundamentally different from this one. There was no 90% approval threshold, and the multiple winners came from the design of the categories themselves: enormous buckets, no requirement to crown a single victor, and a stated goal of spreading recognition around. The Academy did not love the result; it went back to conventional head-to-head races the next year.
Still, the 1965 example is a useful reminder that “everyone wins” is not merely a punchline in Emmy history. The Academy has been down the crowded-podium road before.
And if voters really embrace the intended spirit of the area award, it is not as though the fourth and fifth contenders are filler: Saturday Night Live is the No. 1 winningest show in Emmy history, and The Daily Show is third behind Last Week Tonight and SNL among late-night shows. If voters are being asked whether each nominee is Emmy-worthy on its own terms, there is no reason to believe they would find either show unworthy just because they are in good company.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Four or five winners still feels like the “we’ll be discussing this again at the next rules meeting” outcome. Possible? Sure. Likely? No.
Maybe that’s the right way to think about this category. The Academy built the new Outstanding Variety Series structure because late night has become too small for the old categories but too weird for one clean race. The area-award system gives voters permission to say, “Yes, more than one of these shows deserves an Emmy.”
The question is whether they will.
Final-round Emmy voting concludes August 26 at 10 p.m. PT, with the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards set to air Monday, September 14 on NBC and Peacock.
