HBO’s Emmy Reign Is About to Face Its M&A Reckoning

Congratulations to this week’s Emmy nominees!

I’m happy to see so many new shows (Widow’s Bay, Pluribus, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Spider-Noir, etc.) break through and join the field of returning favorites (The Pitt, Shrinking, The Bear). Not that anybody asked, but I’m personally most excited to see Michael J. Fox score a nomination for his perfect turn on what’s become one of my all-time favorite shows, Shrinking.

Today, as I’ve done for the past decade-plus, I’m taking a 10,000-foot look at the nominations to see how all the corporate giants fared — and I’m also imagining how the current (and coming) industry M&A will change the picture.

First, this year’s straightforward stats: Warner Bros. Discovery leads the pack (128) thanks to a pair of HBO Max originals — The Pitt and Hacks, which finished first and second, respectively. There’s a tie for second place between Disney and Netflix (111 each), with Apple TV (87) finishing third overall. Paramount came in fourth (54), followed by NBCUniversal (44) and Amazon (39). Kudos all around, but especially for David Zaslav’s WBD, which — if it combines with Paramount as planned — would become an even bigger Emmys force.

(A note on methodology: I calculated this year’s nominees using the TV Academy’s list and previously reported annual nominations analysis for 2016-2025. Totals do not include nominations for programs produced for third-party platforms — i.e., 20th Television-produced Nobody Wants This does not count toward Disney totals here, but only for Netflix, where it streams.)

But before we go deeper on the corporate scoreboard, it’s worth asking a more basic question: Why does any of this matter so much right now? I’ve been covering the far-reaching impact of the industry’s post-Peak TV contraction since I joined The Ankler in February 2025. So how has the decline in the overall number of U.S.-produced scripted originals impacted Emmy submission volume?

I studied the top four categories (comedy, drama, limited series and TV movie) going back to 2019, before Covid hit, which heavily impacted Emmy submissions as it also bit into the total number of series produced. The count of scripted originals that aired in the U.S. in 2020 dipped from 532 in 2019 to 493, while Emmy submissions fell from 379 to 279. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023 also contributed to the Peak TV bubble bursting (from 600 shows and 398 submissions in 2023 to 515 and 370, respectively, in 2024).

This year, the number of Emmy submissions across the top four categories slid by more than 20 as fewer shows (444 in 2025, down only seven from 2024) also meant an eight-year low (246).

Fewer shows and fewer submissions mean fewer companies can sustain the scale needed to compete, which is precisely the pressure pushing today’s would-be mergers. So what would this year’s nominations look like under tomorrow’s ownership structure — and what does the past decade of Emmy history look like when you rewrite it through that lens?

Meanwhile, contraction is hardly the industry’s only headache: A recent Bloomberg report has executives at Netflix scrambling to understand why subscribers have been abandoning some of the platform’s biggest shows in their respective second seasons. The troubling viewership data out of Netflix reflects a bigger concern at a time when fewer scripted originals are being produced and watched across the landscape. 

Today I’ll tell you:

• How a combined Paramount-WBD could turn the HBO vs. Netflix narrative on its head
• What YouTube’s massive FYC push did for its creators
• My revisionist history: how today’s ownership structures would change the competitive picture over the past decade
• The what-if scenarios: Say Netflix hadn’t backed out of the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery’s studios & streamer
• What NBCUniversal offers as an acquisition target — and which potential suitor might benefit most from its brand
• How Apple and Amazon have fared as their scripted TV businesses mature — and which is poised to pull ahead