It’s first year in a long time that the top contenders aren’t driving the TV Zeitgeist. (From left: Half Man, Beef season two, DTF St. Louis.)
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Courtesy Everett Collection
According to this year’s Emmys ballot, 31 TV series classified as limited or anthology will contend for the category’s prizes. As with comedies and dramas, that number is down from the highs of a few years ago, but the drop is most stark here, down essentially half from 61 in 2022. Even during that slide, however, the limited-series winners were among the two or three most-nominated shows of the year, not to mention buzziest. The first season of Beef wasn’t just critically acclaimed; it was widely hailed as an avatar of post-pandemic rage. Baby Reindeer activated its audience so intensely that creator Richard Gadd had to beg viewers to stop looking for the real-life people behind his characters. And The White Lotus became one of the biggest TV shows of the 2020s and an ongoing Emmys player, with a total of 66 nominations and 16 wins across three seasons.
This year feels like the first in a long time that limited series aren’t the shows driving the TV Zeitgeist. Beef and Half Man both paled in the shadow of their predecessor seasons (if we count Half Man as the next chapter in Richard Gadd’s masculinity anthology). DTF St. Louis has its supporters but still feels like a cult series. The Beast in Me and All Her Fault were so similar in theme — and premiered so close to each other — that they tend to cannibalize themselves. The closest thing we have to something that felt genuinely buzzy was Love Story, which spurred an early ’90s trend revival, at least among the old NYC haunts that JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette traversed in the series. But can we really put the dozenth Ryan Murphy series at the front of the conversation about what’s fresh and new?
To answer that question, I’m turning to my trusted panel of TV critics — Roxana Hadadi, Jackson McHenry, Nicholas Quah, and Kathryn VanArendonk — to explain the state of the limited series. Why do these shows feel so minor this year? Are we in a limited-series slump, or are viewers looking for a different storytelling vehicle in 2026?
Despite a muted reception, Beef still feels like the front runner. Roxana, you really appreciated season two in all its nasty, punitive fury. Do you agree that this one didn’t land as loudly as the first season three years ago?
ROXANA: I do agree, and I’m not entirely sure why that is. Maybe because we’re in a different TV landscape now, and it’s harder to break through, or maybe people found this season too bleak in a time where everything is already quite bleak? That type of bum-you-out TV is my catnip, but I acknowledge that there was a tightness to Beef’s first installment that the series is now purposefully rejecting, and that’s not going to work for people. The subplot involving the Korean surgical center, with seemingly every woman at this California country club signing up to travel across the world to get work done, was perhaps a first-class flight too far. In terms of awards, though, I think Charles Melton, Oscar Isaac, and Carey Mulligan are putting in solid performances, especially Melton as this pseudo-comrade himbo who loses all his moral certainty as the season goes on. With that said, knowing how these things work, weakest link Cailee Spaeny will probably be the only person nominated because of her horror-story hospital episode.
KATHRYN: It’s pretty impressive how little anyone seemed to talk about this season, though, and I think it’s because it overindexes on bummersville storytelling at a moment when the pendulum is starting to swing back in the other direction. I’m curious whether Emmys timing does not align with the best time of year for viewers to watch this kind of show. A show that makes you that depressed is for November or February. April has too much optimism.
Proposal: Emmys voting takes place at multiple intervals throughout the year, like quarterly tax payments.
JACKSON: I fell off on Beef this season, perhaps because I watched two episodes and thought, I see the themes here, and those themes are tough to swallow. (Capitalism, the cost of health care, how millennials have acceded to a bad system for their creature comforts.) It was a season of TV that felt like it could have been an email.
NICHOLAS: The season didn’t work at all for me. Part of it is because it feels like a retread of the first season’s fundamental feelings of misery, and I didn’t find its observations to be particularly surprising or fresh. (The obvious Parasite allusions come much to its detriment.) I do think it’s worth wondering whether the problem is the execution or the moment. Perhaps we’re a little tapped out on this specific flavor of we’re-so-fucked, everything-sucks class commentary? Charles Melton was excellent, though.
I’m curious how many of us even waded into the male-rage-infested waters of Half Man. While Baby Reindeer had its detractors, Richard Gadd was able to successfully bait-and-switch a true-crime story with a thoughtful examination of gender and sexuality. Half Man didn’t bother with the bait, which I think kept a lot of people away. Even the positive reviews came coupled with assurances that the show was … a lot.
ROXANA: I was mixed on it. It feels like the kind of show that will generate award recognition because it’s diving into heady, heavy subjects like toxic masculinity, addiction, and self-loathing and discrimination within the LGBTQ+ community. And while it is also a major bummer, like Beef, it’s not trying to take on the boundary-hopping international evil that is capitalism, and I think its comparative smallness might serve it well. Ultimately it’s a story about the extremely fucked-up relationship between two brothers, and while Richard Gadd’s bestial performance didn’t work for me, he’s doing the kind of transformational work (getting swole) that voters tend to notice. The better limited series this year about an extremely fucked-up relationship between two brothers was Black Rabbit, but that show seems to have only one fan, who is me.
Black Rabbit seems to be on everybody’s prediction lists juuust below the cutoff point in multiple categories. Half Man went so heavily reprehensible on the Ruben character that at some point it became unrealistic that he hadn’t been pursued up a mountain with torches and pitchforks and forced into the chasm for the good of humanity. I suppose Richard Gadd would say my reaction was part of the point, and maybe he’s right, but I do think the people who voted with their social conscience for Baby Reindeer and Adolescence will be far less eager to do so for a show that stretched its credulity so thin. (He just walked into the wedding of the man he nearly beat to death and nobody said or did anything, did they?)
NICHOLAS: Baby Reindeer and Adolescence had hooks way beyond what those shows were about. Baby Reindeer was a flash of lightning introducing a new talent that felt like it had a completely formed voice in Gadd, and Adolescence had the technical showcases of the oners. Half Man was a conventionally shaped follow-up that saw Gadd not quite expanding in voice.
Of all these shows, Love Story’s reception surprised me the most. It wasn’t universally beloved by any means, but with the exception of the folks riding to Daryl Hannah’s defense, many people seemed to get swept up in that ’90s Soho–, Calvin Klein–, Better Than Ezra–, Cindy Crawford–on–the-–cover–of–George nostalgia. Jackson, I know you didn’t love this story (forgive me), but whether it was the pleasure of discovering Sarah Pidgeon or a determination to travel back in time to when the Kennedys made people feel good — something was working here.
JACKSON: The thing about Love Story is that, on an aesthetic level, it outclassed so much TV by having a real sense of intention and texture. We all want to louchely smoke a cigarette and look like Sarah Pidgeon and flirt with a Kennedy! (Though as the N.Y. primaries revealed, we don’t want to vote for one, thank God.) In this TV landscape where so much buzz depends on a level of social-media LARP-ing — consuming a show as a performance of taste and belonging for your friends and enemies online — that gets you very far. Love Story’s writing was dull and its premise was exploitative and ultimately unrevealing, but great blouses.
KATHRYN: Love Story is the kind of show that could only exist as a limited series (if it was going to be TV at all, that is). Unlike Beast in Me, or All Her Fault, or even Beef, there’s something appealing about Love Story’s preordained end. This is where it fits best; this is what limited series are for. And it really, really hit with audiences, even if some of them were bizarrely upset by the inevitable conclusion.
ROXANA: I already did my Ryan Murphy penance by watching All’s Fair and Monster: The Ed Gein Story and did not bother watching Love Story. However, I was reminded that the show existed by all the emails Anthropologie and Banana Republic sent about their “’90s-inspired chic” collections of spaghetti-strap tank tops and Capri pants. Reducing Carolyn Bessette Kennedy to an array of overpriced basics is Murphy’s real crime.
NICHOLAS: Sarah Pidgeon alone could carry Love Story into some broader Emmys love. I found the show too much of an inert dollhouse — though, that may well be why it drew such a strong aesthetic response from people — and Paul Anthony Kelly was just so leaden that I couldn’t come around feeling all too warmly about it. But Pidgeon is fantastic, and her being an onscreen revelation is something you can hang a campaign on.
DTF St. Louis won two Gotham Awards (Outstanding Limited Series and Outstanding Supporting Performance for David Harbour), and the show and Harbour were both nominated for TCA Awards as well. I admit, I did not see this one being an awards magnet, so maybe somebody here can explain it to me. Was the year’s best limited series secretly the one about a David Harbour/Jason Bateman/Linda Cardellini polycule with an awful title?
JACKSON: I watched four episodes of DTF St. Louis and thought, This could have been a long LiveJournal post. But there was a period for a few months where gay men in their 30s kept telling me at bars that they found it mysteriously compelling. I’m not sure what that’s about. Perhaps the lure of regular Sunday night HBO programming is just that powerful. Perhaps we’re all working through residual Linda Cardellini affection. Perhaps sad sack, often shirtless David Harbour was really working for that specific demo.
KATHRYN: People really, really like to see Jason Bateman on their screens, and that awful title seems to be doing the job they hoped it would. Of every other limited-series contender we’ve talked about, DTF St. Louis is far and away the one I’ve been hearing about from neighbors or at school-pickup chitchats. Sadly, I was the only one bringing up Death by Lightning, although I have no regrets and will keep doing so at every reasonable opportunity. Have you heard the good news? Matthew Macfadyen plays the guy who assassinates President Garfield!
The mustaches and beards, my God! (I do think Nick Offerman is going to get nominated for playing Chester A. Arthur, lout with a heart of gold.)
KATHRYN: Macfadyen was the best thing about that show but if Offerman is all I get, I will take that and be glad.
JACKSON: In a just world we’d be talking about Betty Gilpin, professional long-suffering American-history wife, for Death by Lightning too.
ROXANA: DTF St. Louis fans, bless them, I don’t get it at all. Every episode of this show felt like when you wander into a corner of the suburban Wegmans dining area where everyone’s playing some elaborate board game you’ve never heard of, and they try to explain the rules to you, and two hours later you’re still sitting there with no sense of what the hell is going on. Surely there has to be a better way of understanding men’s loneliness than a show that undercut its female character at every turn. Meanwhile, Death by Lightning, perfect. Shea Whigham should always look like this.
NICHOLAS: Gosh, I just don’t get the Bateman thing in general. And I’m a huge Arrested Development head!
ROXANA: The show that really gets the “Bateman thing in general” and uses his seemingly natural insincerity to its best advantage was — you know I’m going to say it — Black Rabbit!
Nick, I know you were really into Jonathan Banks stepping in to play type on The Beast in Me. Roxana, you called All Her Fault a “misandrist masterpiece.” Kathryn, you’ve had it up to here with both shows employing the inescapable penultimate-flashback trope. In my head, these series exist in tandem since they premiered one week apart in November. Will they end up canceling out each others’ votes?
KATHRYN: I have a theory that most people only watched one of these shows, and for viewers who watched both of them, whichever you watched first is the one you like better. They’re just too similar in genre, in theme, in plot twist, in “oh my God it really goes there” moods. The second one is always going to feel like a rip-off. But that’s also why I think that if one of these does pull ahead, it’ll be The Beast in Me — more people watch Netflix than Peacock, and I have to believe that includes Emmys voters, too.
As an All Her Fault first-er, this theory fits. I thought Sarah Snook pulled her weight and then some while Matthew Rhys and Claire Danes were left to play an increasingly ludicrous game of snarl-and-tremble in The Beast in Me. But Rhys could be theeeee darling of this year’s Emmys class; he’s heavily in contention for Lead Actor in a Comedy for Widow’s Bay, and I could see him winning Lead Actor in a Limited Series for Beast, particularly since Oscar Isaac has maybe gotten the least of the Beef actor attention.
ROXANA: I far preferred All Her Fault’s particular flavor of baby-brain madness and how much time it spent with Sarah Snook’s collapsing-into-tears face. I understand that this is Claire Danes’s lane and I understand that her tears are on heavy rotation in The Beast in Me, but Snook is planting her flag, and I respect that. Team All Her Fault, although I’m also pulling for Rhys.
NICHOLAS: The thing The Beast in Me has that All Her Fault doesn’t is a frisson of prestige-y respectability-ish-ness. Its crisp cinematography and highbrow allusions, with Claire Danes being a New Yorker-ish writer, gives it the advantage over Fault.
JACKSON: It also has Matthew Rhys singing along to “Psycho Killer,” so yeah.
KATHRYN: He also eats chicken. This plus Widow’s Bay? Year of Rhys!
NICHOLAS: Man has range.
Thanks to my cadre of critics for their takes, which have convinced me that Outstanding Limited Series is totally up for grabs this year. I’d still place Beef as the betting favorite, but its inability to grab hold of the cultural conversation the way its first season did makes it very vulnerable to an upset from breakthroughs Love Story or DTF St. Louis. More to come from me on this and the rest of the categories in next week’s edition, Final Nomination Predictions!
Nomination-round voting closed on Monday, leaving us with two weeks of idle speculation about who’ll make the cut once everything is tabulated. In the meantime, all we have is anecdotal evidence based on what we’re hearing from various anonymous Emmys voters. Here, a small and statistically non-definitive handful of Emmys voters led me to a handful of highly speculative conclusions:
(1) Nobody thinks it’ll work, but they’re voting for Industry.
To the question, “What’s a show or performance you voted for even though you don’t think they’re likely to be nominated?” we saw across-the-board support for HBO’s Industry. The critically lauded (especially around these parts) HBO series has been roundly ignored by the Emmys for its first three seasons, but the fourth time might be the charm if anonymous voters are any indication. And the one performance singled out wasn’t the oft-buzzed-about Marisa Abela or Ken Leung but rather Kit Harington as the broken failson of a broken failson in episode three.
(2) Everybody wants to watch Widow’s Bay, even if they haven’t started yet.
As popular and buzzy as Widow’s Bay has been lately, its late-breaking status could be a detriment if it means not enough Emmys voters watched it yet. The folks who have seen the show loudly support it (and Supporting Actress hopeful Kate O’Flynn), but this sampling of voters merely expressed an excitement to finally watch it — they just haven’t yet. If voters like these use the rest of the summer to catch up, Widow’s Bay and its cast and crew could reap a bunch of votes to win some Emmys. However, they need to get nominated first.
(3) Don’t get too excited for that Traitors writing nomination.
As cool as it would be to see a reality series nominated among the late-night talk shows and Saturday Night Live in the Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series category, none of our polled voters seemed to know or care that this was even a possibility. “Seems suspect to me,” one voter said with a shrug. Maybe they’re all standing in solidarity with poor fired Fergus.
(4) Shawn Hatosy is the man.
One of our voters was particularly enthusiastic to cast a vote for The Pitt’s Shawn Hatosy. While he’s on the ballot for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama, this voter was determined to recognize him as director of the season’s ninth episode (“3:00 P.M.”). “I was watching it cold, and even just from the first scenes I said, ‘Whoever this is is a good director, I’d hire them.’ Then boom, his director credit popped up. Startled me. But actors often make great directors!”
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