In spite of (or maybe even because of) the tough times Hollywood is battling right now (everything from the devastating Palisades and Eaton wildfires to large, expensive mergers that cause massive layoffs), networks seem to be campaigning harder than ever for their Emmys.
In the period before official voting kicked off, each night brought a different show presenting to Television Academy members at locations that included everywhere from the Los Angeles Lakers training facility to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour stop at SoFi Stadium and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures several times over. After Emmy nominations? It’s been more of a free-for-all.
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The TV Academy’s inaugural Televerse festival, and all the events surrounding it, offered a more centralized proving ground, all of it unfolding the weekend before official voting kicked off. Televerse, in its first year, gave attendees a better idea of what shows will win and, more broadly, where the TV industry itself stands.
Below, IndieWire takes a temperature on the 2025 Emmys race going into voting, and shares the highlights and lowlights of what we saw at the big event.
Televerse Had the Right Vision
The Television Academy can breathe easier knowing that the initial reaction to Televerse is not all bad, despite some bumps in the road that we will dive into below.
There’s plenty to be said about an event that allowed attendees to run from a workshop on breaking story with “Andor” Season 2 writer Beau Willimon, to a panel conversation on new TV adaptations, to “RuPaul’s Drag Race” nominees panel featuring a LipSync LaLaPaRuza Smackdown with Queens from Season 17, all back-to-back and steps away from each other inside the J.W. Marriott near L.A. Live.
Although it is miles away from where much of the FYC events usually happen, that ease of going room to room (with snacks at the door!) convinced enough people that the festival has potential.
While the workshops were predictably popular (one featuring Henry Winkler was among the first Televerse events to sell out), the series of panels that saw a lot of engagement from attendees, which were a mix of people involved in the TV Academy, general public who bought tickets, and press, were the panels on artificial intelligence.
More fascinating? The breadth of ideas on display in those panels. Something like “The Legal Future of AI in TV” had a more positive lean on new technology, while “Performers & AI – Contracts, Consent & Compensation” felt more like a call to action in mitigating AI’s effect on the industry. It showed that, at the very least, the TV Academy had its finger on the pulse of what the industry is discussing and debating.
…Especially with the Television Academy Hall of Fame
The Television Academy Hall of Fame ceremony is far from a new occurrence, but has long had trouble catching on as an annual event since, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Its latest iteration, which served as the closing event for the three-day Televerse festival, was impressive enough to bolster it as the TV Academy’s answer to the Governors Awards.
For one, it similarly hosted attendees that happen to be on the campaign trail, like current Emmy nominees Uzo Aduba (“The Residence”), Jeff Hiller (“Somebody Somewhere”), and Sheryl Lee Ralph and Janelle James (“Abbott Elementary”). But the acceptance speeches were also engaging enough to be clipped within the Primetime Emmys telecast.
Actress Viola Davis had the audience hanging on her every word, telling them, “This whole career has been a party going on inside of me, and that party has sustained me, has healed me.” Composer Mike Post dedicated his speech to his collaborators, including the late Pete Carpenter.
TV mogul Ryan Murphy mostly stuck to gratitude for his FX colleagues, with Disney President Dana Walden being the one to hand him the induction award, though his clip package did feature never-before-seen sneak peeks at the new season of his currently Emmy-nominated Netflix project “Monsters,” subtitled “The Original Monster” and about Ed Gein. He also referred to actress Sarah Paulson, in the audience, as his muse that he’s written 15 characters for, and highlighted how he’s created and written over 250 gay characters, 300 or so women over 40 characters, over one thousand trans characters, and 10 straight male characters named Brad.
While not in attendance as originally planned, comedian Adam Sandler introduced honoree Henry Winkler via video message, in which he shared how the Emmy winner playing his father in “Click” helped him deal with losing his father in real life. It poignantly fit with the next award to the late live events director Don Mischer being accepted by his widow Suzan and their children.
Finally, recent Oscar host and current Emmy nominee Conan O’Brien brought levity back to the event, joking about its downtown Los Angeles location, in a ballroom likely just a floor above where quinceañeras are hosted. Plus, he showed support for fellow soon-to-be former late night host Stephen Colbert, saying he’s “too talented and too essential to go away” and will “shine brighter than ever in a new format that he controls completely,” in reaction to his peer’s fallout with Paramount.
But It Did Not Have the Desired Attendance
To O’Brien’s point, getting voters over to L.A. Live, more a sports and concert pavilion with expensive public parking, can be a big ask.
In terms of nominee panels, certain shows were able to draw what seemed like sold-out crowds, but the average panel was half-full at best, hence there not being too many official event photos that feature the audience. Some shows that initially planned panels switched to just screening an episode, and the panels that did happen struggled to fill the hour-long timeslot bequeathed upon them.
The “Shrinking” panel even got boos from the crowd for ending around 30 minutes early, until it became clear that it was because star Harrison Ford was exhausted from all the travel to be in L.A. for the event (he stuck around for an extra 10 minutes). HBO was the only network to have two shows share an hour-long timeslot, so that the nominee panels could be tighter.
Ultimately, a venue closer to where the TV Academy is based in North Hollywood would probably help with event attendance, as would a more robust activation floor, akin to a convention. Though there were a few screens in the lounge (and one VR headset station), there was not much for attendees to do onsite besides go to panels, and voters actually had a limit on how many they could attend for free.
“The Pitt” and “The Studio” Win the Festival
While we did not hear too much buzz around the Reality Competition Program and Limited or Anthology Series panels, IndieWire heard from several attendees that “The Studio” and “The Pitt” panels were by far the most popular nominee panels of the festival.
That’s not too surprising, as “The Studio” leads the Comedy categories in Emmy nominations. But “The Pitt” detail is particularly revelatory, as the freshman HBO Max hit has less than half the nominations that the perceived Drama frontrunner “Severance” has. And that audience is one that woke up early to get there, as “The Pitt” panel started at 10 a.m. on Saturday.
The panel for “Paradise,” the Hulu series that’s the other freshman show to earn an Outstanding Drama Series nomination, which happened earlier in the week, also reportedly had a nice turnout. One theory is that both “The Pitt” and “Paradise” are already hard at work on their second seasons, and are therefore able to provide fresher insights into the series than other nominees that often have years long gulfs between seasons airing (e.g. “Andor,” “Severance,” “The Last of Us”).
It is almost as if the return to a more traditional annual TV release schedule is now an advantage for some nominees.
But “Severance” Wins the Weekend
All that said, Televerse was just but one event in a packed weekend schedule for the “Severance” crew. The Dan Erickson-created Apple TV+ hit had executive producer and director Ben Stiller do a live podcast taping of Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast (alongside “The Studio” creator/star Seth Rogen,) a live “Severance” podcast taping with lead Adam Scott and several cast members, and even had Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series nominee Tramell Tillman surprise his “Severance” colleague again, interrupting Stiller’s introduction of a “Zoolander” screening at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery with the USC marching band— a reference to the “Severance” Season 2 finale.
Other shows were doing cool events, from “Andor” having a zine-signing to HBO having its own day of panels the day after Televerse, but this awards season, “Severance” seems to be the most on top of organizing events and moments that get voters not only attending, but talking, making it hard to count out the sci-fi thriller series as a serious Emmys contender across the board.
