I wrote about Sony and Prime Video’s new Spider-Man shows, interviewed Mike Schur and J.J. Philbin about comedy, and wrote about the new overall deals economy and David Ellison’s brutal cable choices.
After moving into the scripted originals space in 2013, Netflix became the first streaming platform to lead all Emmy winners when it tied with HBO in 2018. Since then, the Emmys has largely been a two-horse race.
Until now.
Apple TV, which entered this year’s Emmys with 87 nominations, trailing HBO/HBO Max (122) and Netflix (111), on Monday officially dethroned both platforms — powered by Widow’s Bay, Katie Dippold’s horror comedy led all series with 14 wins. The platform overseen by Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht finished with 28 wins, while HBO/HBO Max collected 21, including outstanding drama for The Pitt and outstanding limited series for DTF St. Louis. Netflix finished a distant third with 16 trophies.
That number is particularly striking: It’s Netflix’s worst Emmy showing since 2016, when the streamer was still only four years into competing for the awards.
Amazon’s Prime Video, which is reportedly in talks to pick up the Emmys telecast, finished with only 10 — with half coming from a show it just canceled.
But the results are more interesting as a business story than an awards story. Apple didn’t merely beat Netflix. It did so while spending a fraction of what Netflix spends on content and making far fewer shows — an extraordinary validation, at least on Emmy night, of two nearly opposite approaches to streaming.
And there’s another wrinkle: The biggest winner of the entire Emmys was also the least-watched comedy among the nominees.
(For more on the critical side of this year’s Emmy winners, be sure to check out Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen’s Prestige Junkie podcast.)
So what exactly did Apple buy with all those Emmys? How much should HBO worry about finishing second as its corporate future hangs in the balance? And does Netflix’s slide signal a prestige problem — or simply that the world’s biggest streamer is now playing a different game?
Then there’s the question hanging over all three: How much do Emmys matter if the shows winning them aren’t necessarily the shows audiences are watching?
Let’s get into it.
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