What Betting Markets Say About Emmys
How Kalshi's trends stack up against my own predictions
It took me many months after reading my colleague Matthew Frank’s eye-opening reporting, but I have finally wrapped my mind around Kalshi. The 100 percent legal exchange — more of a stock market than a casino, as Matthew puts it — allows users to place bets on everything from when Trump will relent on his Canadian tariffs to the #1 movie on Netflix this week.
Most interesting to me, of course, is that you can also place bets on awards. While I won’t be placing bets personally — I’m not enough of a psychopath to think I can truly shape an awards race toward my own financial benefit, but just in case! — I’ve been fascinated to observe the extent to which the money on Kalshi is following conventional wisdom, and the site’s limitations for actually predicting the future.
For example: In the time since I started drafting this newsletter late last week, the odds for Severance winning the outstanding drama series Emmy have gone down substantially, as the currently airing seasons of Andor and The Last of Us garner critical attention. It’s true that the drama series race is tight, but the recency bias for the newest shows won’t be relevant at all by the time final Emmy voting is happening in August. Betting markets can be a snapshot of how a whole lot of people feel at this exact moment without telling us much at all about how actual votes will be cast by TV Academy voters.
Betting markets got a lot of attention ahead of the 2024 presidential election, where they predicted Trump’s victory weeks before most polls did. But if you look at Kalshi’s Oscar markets, they appeared to be more reactive, jumping up the odds on The Brutalist after its Golden Globes wins, for example, and herding into Anora for Best Picture after it won its first award during the ceremony.
Could the betting markets become better awards predictors than hard-working, humble pundits like me? After digging through Kalshi’s 16 Emmy markets, I think there are a lot of solid assumptions emerging from this wisdom of the crowd — but the odds also betray an over-reliance on past winners, whether recent Emmys or this past winter’s awards shows.
Repeat winners have been a hallmark of the Emmys since the very beginning – just ask Dick Van Dyke about his three consecutive Emmys for The Dick Van Dyke Show. But I suspect this isn’t the year to bet on incumbents, even as hundreds of people are apparently doing literally just that on Kalshi.
No More Emmy Reruns?
Nearly every Emmy ceremony of the past 10 years has had at least one repeat winner — John Oliver’s stranglehold on the talk categories remains unchallenged, for one thing — but recently there’s been more of a trend toward heaping a ton of awards on one show for a season or two, then moving on to another favorite. In 2020 Schitt’s Creek became the first comedy series to ever sweep all seven of the top awards in its category; a year later, The Crown did the same thing for drama.
The exception to this trend, once again, may turn out to be Jean Smart. She’s won three Emmys for three seasons of Hacks, her star undimmed even when Hacks took a year off between its second and third seasons. This year, with Hacks as the reigning comedy champion and again earning raves for its current fourth season, Smart is still the smart money; Kalshi has her odds of victory at 78 percent, with The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri in second place with a paltry 11 percent.
Despite formidable competition in the comedy category, I’m going with Kalshi on this one. Smart’s continued dominance dovetails neatly with the theme of the show, where her character Deborah Vance continues to adapt to the modern age and triumph. It’s also a category that’s particularly fond of winning streaks. Julia Louis-Dreyfus famously won this award six times in a row for Veep. Helen Hunt — excellent on this season of Hacks, as it turns out — won four in a row for Mad About You and Candice Bergen has five for Murphy Brown. When Emmy voters appreciate their funny women, they are eager to do it over and over again.
If Smart is the only repeat acting winner from 2024, though, I won’t be surprised. The comedy category is the only one where any of last year’s acting winners are eligible, and all of the other slots last year went to actors from The Bear — Jeremy Allen White for lead and Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Liza Colon-Zayas in supporting. I sometimes think The Bear’s fall from grace is overblown — it is certainly going to get a lot of nominations once again — but its stranglehold has weakened since its blockbuster first season.
The odds on Kalshi are still in favor of Moss-Bachrach, who would be going for his third win in a row. But I bet we’ll see some momentum for Shrinking’s Harrison Ford, truly excellent on a show that’s flown under the awards radar in its first two seasons, or his co-star Michael Urie, also a gem. The inside baseball appeal of The Studio could give Ike Barinholtz a shot at a win or allow Paul W. Downs to add an acting trophy to the three he’s already earned as a co-creator of Hacks.
Lead actor in a comedy feels wide-open as well, with Martin Short’s victory at the SAG Awards seemingly giving him an edge in the Kalshi odds, but Jeremy Allen White still right there in the mix — he won his third Golden Globe in a row in January, after all. Seth Rogen will be up for many awards for The Studio, this one included, but I wouldn’t underestimate the throwback appeal of Adam Brody for Nobody Wants This, especially after he won the Critics Choice Award in this category. Three different winners at three different precursor awards shows tells you just what a jump ball this is.
For supporting actress in a comedy, though, the future seems a bit clearer. As well deserved as Colon-Zayas’ victory was last season, her narrative as reigning champion will likely be overshadowed by the sense that it’s finally time for Hannah Einbinder, the dutiful second banana to Jean Smart on Hacks, to have her moment. Much as Smart’s winning streak makes sense within the narrative of the show, Einbinder’s string of losses suits her constantly self-defeating character, Ava. But enough is enough — Einbinder is truly a co-lead on Hacks, and if Emmy voters love the show as much as they seem to, a victory for her is long overdue. Kalshi agrees — Einbinder is given a 78 percent chance of winning.
Penguin Lessons
You might be forgiven for thinking there’s another returning champion in the mix given how many times he’s made awards show speeches in the last year. Colin Farrell ran the table at the winter awards shows for his transformative performance in The Penguin, the Max limited series that debuted last fall. He and his co-star Cristin Miloti — she won a Critics Choice Award, it’s worth noting — are both still formidable in a limited series race that’s a little less starry than it used to be.
And yet, Farrell won at all those awards shows in part because he was not yet up against the phenomenon of Adolescence, nor was Milioti contending with Michelle Williams in Dying for Sex. The Penguin has the benefit of being the only limited series priority for HBO, which is stuck balancing The Last of Us, The White Lotus and sibling Max Original The Pitt in the drama categories. But I’m still not sure how strong The Penguin can remain while facing off against Adolescence, which is running series co-creator and star Stephen Graham in the lead actor category against Farrell. Kalshi, for now, still gives the edge to Farrell.
The Globes, Critics Choice and SAG Awards include a lot of winners that were eligible for last year’s Emmys, like Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning. So it’s really up to Farrell — plus lead comedy actor contenders Short, White and Brody — to show us if an awards bump really can carry from January all the way to September.
Here’s one more reason the betting markets will be fascinating to watch between now and September: After May 31, by which date all a show must premiere to be Emmy-eligible, virtually nothing about this race will publicly change. Unlike Oscar season, with its precursor awards and endless in-person events, shifts in the Emmy race largely take place out of the public eye, or really in the minds of more than 25,000 Emmy voters as they fill out their ballots. Can any Kalshi users really detect if, say, a few thousand voters decide they really want this to be Gary Oldman’s year for Slow Horses? Oldman’s being given a 4 percent chance on the exchange right now, so if you really believe in him, now’s the time to place that bet.