The 2026 Emmy Award nominees have been revealed in the Outstanding Variety Series and Reality Competition categories today Wednesday morning show.
The candidates for the reality competition are Dancing with the Stars, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Survivor, Top Chef and Traitors.
The nominees for the variety series are The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Night with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live.
Earlier this year, the Emmys combined the Emmys categories for Outstanding Written Variety Series and Outstanding Talk Series into Outstanding Revivaled Variety Series. The split eventually made him the permanent winner Last Week Tonight with John Oliver In the miscellaneous category written with a long-running drawing series Saturday Night Livethe most Emmy Award-winning program in television history. Instead, the Best Talk Series category was made up of shows containing interview segments or panel discussions, with the 2025 trophy in that category going to CBS. Late Show with Stephen Colbertwhich has since been cancelled. Final Late show The episode aired on May 21.
Meanwhile, Oliver Last week tonight It won Best Scripted Variety Series in 2025, 2024 and 2023.
The variety series change came with a decline in the number of submissions in the variety show and scripted talk series categories. Additionally, the Television Academy classifies the Variety Series category as a “region award,” meaning it can produce multiple winners.
The winner of last year’s reality competition was TraitorsTopping the category for the second year in a row.
The rest of the 2026 Emmy nominations will be announced later Wednesday morning.
Previous Emmy Winners Lisa Colon-Zayas (Bear(and Jeff Heller)Someone somewhere) will reveal the rest of this year’s Emmy nominees at 830 a.m. PT in a ceremony that will be broadcast live from the Television Academy’s Saban Media Center.
Although the Emmys originally planned to announce this year’s nominees in two batches, with the majority revealed on July 8 and the additional nominees revealed a week later, on July 15, the Television Academy announced that it would announce all of this year’s nominees on July 8. The move was designed to better accommodate the Emmy nominees’ promotional schedules.
Mariska Hargitay is set to host the 2026 Emmys, which will air live on NBC and Peacock on Monday, September 14 at 8pm ET/5pm PT. The Creative Arts Emmys, where the majority of the Emmys are presented, will be held about a week earlier, on Saturday, September 5, and Sunday, September 6.
Hargitay is the first Emmys host not known primarily for his comedic work in nearly two decades. But she is an Emmy winner, having won the award in 2006 for her role as Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU, the longest-running prime-time drama in the history of American television, which begins its 28th season on NBC in the fall.
Hargitay is also nominated for the 2026 Emmys, with her 2025 HBO documentary about matriarch Jayne Mansfield. My mom Janeeligible for awards this year.
The first winners of the 2025 Emmys are: Teenage studio and the house.
