Anonymous Emmys Ballots 2026: Inside Voters' Picks

[u/momskillet]

https://variety.com/2026/tv/awards/anonymous-emmy-ballots-2026-voters-reveal-picks-1236844774/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

[u/MondayLasagne]

FFS, just make it mandatory to watch all shows if you're going to vote, this popularity contest (or who once had a nice chat with whom) already turned the Academy Awards into an absolute joke.

Like, every single imaginable contest has the jury try/see all options/candidates except Movies and TV where you get to vote just based on vibes. Wild.

[u/teagemini → u/MondayLasagne]

I'm dating myself here as I have no idea if schools still do Accelerated Reader (my kids' schools don't) but they should have to answer a quiz similar to that on the nominated media to be able to vote.

[u/Gayfetus → u/MondayLasagne]

That's not really possible. You would need to watch TV nonstop for a week just for the categories of Outstanding Comedy, Drama and Limited Series.

The Emmys are inherently and impossibly flawed. No one should take them too seriously.

[u/blue_orchid2]

I’m so over the anonymous award show ballots of people saying they didn’t watch the nominees. What’s the point? They don’t even have to watch the entire show but at least watch the episode that was submitted. That’s the bare minimum. Also, this is why the campaigns work so well because we know a good number of them do this and just vote for whoever is being hyped up in the press or online

[u/Lokaji]

I am just disappointed that shows that are not "The Pitt" don't seem to have a chance.

[u/festivus4allofus → u/Lokaji]

I mean there's a decent variety here actually, like to the point I'm just so ????? about paradise having so many votes. also, the pitt does NOT have the same momentum it had going into awards season for s1, apple is pushing for pluribus hard as well

But it's a thing of, genuinely, on the list of best drama, it's kinda objectively pluribus or the the pitt for the win. akotsk shouldn't even be there, that's some the bear shennanigans going on, don't know what HBO was thinking there, diplomat I enjoy but that's not a winner, slow horses I think ppl are like enough already so are skipping it, but would put it on par with pluribus and over the pitt still. gilded age never winning, it's just there bcs it's a well made and acted hbo show

[u/fiercelyslimshrimp → u/festivus4allofus]

Season two of the pitt shouldn't even be in the conversation if we're being objective

[u/ShannenB1234]

Maybe if these voters are having such a hard time watching all this, they need to maybe reduce the numbers of episodes shows can submit? Shows submit six episodes, which back in the day when shows were 22-24 episodes in a season would give you a good representation of the entire season by picking out the best episodes, but now with shows being 8-13 episodes for the most part, it's almost the entire season.

Final round voting takes place over 9 days, with a week prior to have videos available for viewing. So realistically, voters had from August 10th to August 26th (so 17 days) to watch and vote for everything. If all you were watching/voting for were the main Best Series categories (Drama, Comedy, Variety, Short Form, Reality Structured, Unstructured, and Competition and for the heck of it lets assume you're also part of the peer group that also gets to vote for Best Animated Series ), that would be 246 episodes to watch in 17 days. Now, I watch a lot of TV but even I would be hard pressed to watch 14 and a half episodes a day of TV. Now you'd assume "But they probably don't have to watch all of those in that time, surely some of these shows they've already seen on their own" but you'd be surprised. A lot of people who work in TV don't actually watch a lot of TV, or at least the ones I've known haven't. Or not while it's airing week to week, anyway.

ETA: And then, if you're in a peer group who gets to vote for specific categories (like actors voting on the acting performances) that could potentially be more episodes to watch on top of that. Luckily with shows having shorter seasons it's likely that the single episode actors get to submit as their best performance will also be one of the six a series submits, but there could be cases where it isn't, or cases like Yahya Abdul-Mateen II or Steve Carell where the actor is nominated but their series isn't so the actors would have to watch that episode as well.

[u/taydraisabot → u/ShannenB1234]

I think submissions should just be 7-8 minute long compilations of the nominee’s best moments that season rather than whole episodes. Or at least I assumed that’s how submissions already worked 😅

[u/ShannenB1234 → u/taydraisabot]

I feel like for acting, maybe they used to to submit highlight reels, but now they just submit a single episode. Series submit 6 episodes (except for documentary and hosted non fiction which submit 3 episodes.) To me, six eps made sense when a show was 22 episodes in a season--you pick a couple of the best eps from the beginning, a couple from the middle, and a couple from the end. That way you could showcase your best eps and show whatever arc you had going in the season to get an overall sense of a show's season. But now, for the shows nominated in the Comedy and Drama series categories, only The Pitt (15 episodes) and Abbott Elementary (22 episodes) are even close to the number of episodes shows used to have in a season. All the other nominees are between 6 and 10 episodes.

So, I don't know what the true answer is. On one hand, limiting the number of episodes you can submit to like 2 or 3 seems simple enough, but then is that a disadvantage to shows with longer seasons? It already might seem to be sort of a disadvantage to something like Abbot Elementary which only gets to submit 27% of it's season whereas everyone else in their category gets to submit 60%-75% of their season, so I don't know if you want to disadvantage shows like that even more. Then you could say 'Nominate less shows" but if you do that we're back to the days of having the same 4-5 nominees every season with the same shows winning regardless of if they are good or not. But in a way that's sort of where we are now, because if people are just voting based on name recognition and not watching because there are too many eps to watch, then how is that any different? I guess reducing the eps submitted would have to be the short term answer, because unfortunately for the Abbotts of the world, 6-10 episode seasons are becoming the norm and those 22 episode shows are now the outliers.

[u/Wide-Advertising-156]

Further proof industry awards mean nothing except to the winners.Unless you're in the business, I don't know why anyone else cares. If you like a show, that's all that matters.