And the 2026 Emmy nominees for best variety series are… The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live! In other words, the five shows The Hollywood Reporter (and probably you) predicted.
So the Television Academy voters went chalk, which left out dark-horse candidate Hot Ones — the viral Sean Evans-hosted talk show could have been the first YouTube series ever nominated in the category. Maybe next year. It was not all a yawn, however: the Emmy Awards‘ variety series category itself has a new look this year.
For the past decade, the variety series category was the variety series … categories, with scripted and talk separated. Not anymore. The TV Academy’s consolidation, announced in January, followed a years-long decline in the number of series submitted in the best scripted variety series and best variety talk series categories. The current setup — one variety show to rule them all — is how the Emmys operated prior to a 2015 rule change. More or less.
The type of variety submission — scripted variety series or talk series — informed the number of nominees today in the unified category. In other words, the nods are proportional to the number of submissions received for each format.
In addition, best variety series is now considered an “area award,” meaning it could produce multiple winners. Nominees for area awards are judged individually on their own merits, so instead of Emmy voters being asked to identify a category winner, voters will be asked about each nominee, “Does this nominee merit an Emmy? Yes/No.” Any nominee that reaches a 90 percent “Yes” threshold will receive an Emmy. If no nominee reaches the 90 percent threshold, then the nominee with the highest “Yes” percentage will be the sole winner.
In the future, should both formats reach 20 submissions in the same year, the Television Academy will automatically split the categories into two again.
But for the present, what we got were the obvious candidates: Last Week Tonight always wins, SNL is in a class of its own — pretty literally here — and The Daily Show still carries cultural cachet. And this time, the two nominated broadcast-TV late night talk shows have each earned their position on the ballot the hard way.
The Late Show famously ended in May after CBS axed the traditional late night talk show format. Colbert blamed politics, Paramount cited cost. A honorary nomination (at the very least) was a slam dunk.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! had its own circus to navigate this past season. In September, Kimmel was suspended by Disney/ABC for a few days following an inaccurate observation he made regarding the political leanings of Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin.
Colbert and Kimmel are both on President Trump’s (probably very real) list of enemies in the mainstream media. As a result, both men have especially been through the ringer this year — will that be enough to take down John Oliver come September? Or might they just join him?
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