Night two of the Creative Arts Emmys 2025 opened the door to a couple fascinating upsets that could happen at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards on Sunday, September 14, but they require some context.
Since 2003 the only shows to win the category now known as Outstanding Talk Series have been “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” or a series hosted by talent that served as a correspondent during Stewart’s initial tenure on the Comedy Central staple. They were “The Colbert Report” twice, before Stewart won again for his farewell season in 2015, then “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” for seven years in a row, before the weekly HBO show was moved to the new Outstanding Scripted Variety Series category, which made way for “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” to win in 2023 (for the South African comedian’s final season hosting,) leading to Stewart’s weekly return to “The Daily Show” winning every year since.
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However, with the announcement of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on CBS coming to an end, in what is assumed to be a concession to the Trump administration in order to get parent company Paramount’s merger with Skydance approved, there has been a push for Colbert’s broadcast talk show to finally win the Outstanding Talk Series for its penultimate season. Even fellow nominee Jimmy Kimmel has used his own campaign ads to tell Television Academy members to vote for Colbert.
This has all been concurrent with “The Daily Show,” which is also the property of Paramount, getting 12 Emmy nominations — more nominations than it has ever gotten before — due to its complementary programming like “The Daily Show: Desi Lydic Foxsplains” and “The Daily Show Presents: Jordan Klepper Fingers The Pulse: MAGA: The Next Generation,” which were nominated and just won Emmys for categories like Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama or Variety Series and Outstanding Writing for a Nonfiction Program, respectively.
Meanwhile, the Emmy nominations haul for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” has gotten smaller and smaller over the years, as the Variety categories in general have had fewer submissions, and therefore fewer nomination slots. The whole Paramount ordeal happened after nominations voting had already closed. “The Daily Show” is the only perennial Outstanding Talk Series nominee that has been consistently nominated for both Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series and Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series, often up against “Saturday Night Live,” which usually always wins the former, and “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” which usually always wins the latter.
But that changed this year! “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” won Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series — the only other Emmy category it was nominated for besides Outstanding Talk Series. But does that mean the show, which is set to shutter next year, will finally be the one to dethrone “The Daily Show” in the Outstanding Talk Series category?
Not so fast. Even if “Saturday Night Live” did not win Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series specifically, director Liz Patrick still won Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special for “SNL50: The Anniversary Special.” The 50th season of “Saturday Night Live,” and the programming that surrounded it, was actually a dominant force at the Creative Arts Emmys this year, also earning trophies for production design, sound mixing, makeup, hairstyling, picture editing, lighting design/direction, technical direction (for a series and special,) writing for a variety special, and even Outstanding Emerging Media Program for “SNL 50 Special: Immersive Experience.”
So what exactly are the aforementioned upsets that could’ve just been teed up by the Creative Arts Emmys 2025 wins? Going category by category, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” winning for directing is still a good sign it could finally beat “The Daily Show” in Outstanding Talk Series, which would be an upset in the broader sense. But if “The Daily Show” wins again this year of all years (which is very possible considering the amount of Creative Arts Emmys it already won,) it would be an upset within the context of this year, where the creative community seemed to have been rallying around Colbert.
Moving onto the Outstanding Scripted Variety Series category, “Saturday Night Live” has lost to “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” every year since the new category placing the shows in competition with each other was established. The chance that the late night NBC series could pull off an upset in its anniversary year seems high, as it already won categories like picture editing and technical direction, which Oliver’s show had pretty consistently won for a stretch of years.
But with all the different options that came with the “SNL50” of it all, the most likely scenario is status quo in the Outstanding Scripted Variety Series category, but a win for Outstanding Variety Special (Live) category, which would be its own upset (fellow nominees “The Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show Starring Kendrick Lamar,” “Beyoncé Bowl,” and “The Oscars” have all also won Creative Arts Emmys this year.)
All this makes the Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series a category to keep an eye on specifically, because if “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” doesn’t win, that would have quite the snowball effect on the variety categories, whose results have been tediously immutable.
