The 2025 Emmys: A big night for newcomers

The Studio set a record with a total one-year haul of 13 statuettes

(Image credit: Kevin Mazur / Getty Images)

“The 77th Emmy Awards turned out to be one of the most surprising in years,” said Missy Schwartz in The Wrap. In “an evening of upsets,” HBO’s new throwback hospital drama The Pitt scored the biggest coup by topping the surreal workplace thriller Severance as best drama series. Meanwhile, stars Colin Farrell, Kathy Bates, and Harrison Ford lost acting races to less celebrated rivals, and Seth Rogen’s new Hollywood spoof The Studio, while favored to win best comedy series, shut out previous awards darling The Bear and set a record with a total one-year haul of 13 statuettes. Sure, Adolescence’s victory for best limited series was also no surprise. But the Netflix show about a 13-year-old charged with murder added a “jaw-dropper” when its adult lead, Stephen Graham, denied Farrell a trophy for his title turn in HBO’s The Penguin.

As usual, the evening’s best moments were unscripted, said Alan Sepinwall in Rolling Stone. Veteran actor Jeff Hiller was “stunned and visibly shaking” after winning a supporting actor honor for HBO’s “lovely and underseen” Somebody Somewhere. And Severance supporting actor Tramell Tillman movingly thanked his mother for being his first acting coach. Still, it was Stephen Colbert who “stole the show,” said Rob Sheffield, also in Rolling Stone. Colbert garnered two standing ovations, one when he presented the first award and one when his The Late Show won its category’s Emmy for the first time, and did so on the very network that has announced it is canceling the show. “While I have your attention,” Colbert quipped, “is anyone hiring?”

Host Nate Bargatze devised a running joke for the broadcast that “probably seemed like a good idea on paper,” said Shirley Li in The Atlantic. He declared that each winner would have just 45 seconds to speechify and that every second of overrun would reduce a pledged $100,000 donation to the Boys & Girls Club of America. It all backfired. As an onscreen clock ticked off the thousands that chatterbox winners were costing needy children, many victors panicked. The stunt wound up underlining “just how necessary speeches are to the show’s pageantry” and how “lethargic” the scripted banter of presenters has become. Each time Bargatze mentioned the seconds supposedly wasted, he “undermined the emotions of the speeches while making the Boys & Girls Club come off more as a punch line than a worthy cause.”