2025 Emmy Nominations: 5 Egregious Snubs and 5 Fun Surprises

Time​ Magazine

4 days ago

Another Emmy season is off to the races as of Tuesday morning, with what turned out to be a fairly predictable list of 2025 nominees that heavily favors returning series. The Television Academy loves The White Lotus, Severance, Abbott Elementary, Hacks, The Bear? Tell me something I don't know. But mixed in among the Pedro Pascals and Jean Smarts and the Martin Shorts we always knew were going to get nominated are some truly wonderful surprises—along with some truly infuriating, if you're the type to get worked up about such trivialities, exclusions. Below are five of each.
5 Egregious Exclusions
The Pitt was one of this morning's big winners, as was widely predicted, scoring 13 nominations including drama series, lead actor (Noah Wyle), and supporting actress (Katherine LaNasa)—all richly deserved. Conspicuously absent from the list, however, was Taylor Dearden's breakout performance as Dr. Mel King, a sensitive and apparently neurodivergent young resident who cares for an autistic sister. As Sarah Kurchak wrote for TIME in an appreciation of the character and Dearden's portrayal of her: 'What makes Dr. King such a refreshing change from the old autistic-coded tropes, though, are the range of characteristics she embodies, how they're integrated into her character, and how she's incorporated into the show.'
Lyonne earned a nomination for her lead performance in this delightful Columbo homage's first season, on top of three nods for previous roles, so it's not like the Academy has some vendetta against her. Which makes it all the more confusing why she didn't earn any recognition for Poker Face's delightful second season, even if the category is particularly stacked this year. As its only consistent cast member, Lyonne is basically the whole show. Few actors have the personality to pull that off. Nor is she just coasting on charisma. This season's recently concluded arc also required her to bear the emotional weight of the many murders she's solved, in a reckoning that allowed viewers to glimpse a darker, more vulnerable Charlie Cale.
Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder are the heart of Hacks; no one's debating that, and Einbinder's nomination in particular (always as a supporting actress, in a bit of perhaps-justifiable category fraud) makes me hopeful she'll take home her first trophy for a performance that gets better every season (Smart already has three lead actress wins). But the show has also increasingly thrived on the odd-couple chemistry between co-creator Downs, who plays Hollywood's gentlest manager, and breakout star Stalter as his assistant turned partner. Especially since Hacks has been an Emmy darling for its entire run—and both Downs and Stalter had buzz for their superior work in Season 4—it's disappointing to see them excluded.
Petticrew gave a breathtaking, multifaceted performance as real-life IRA militant Dolours Price, in a role that required her to do everything from hold up a bank in a nun costume to, in one harrowing episode, endure force feeding during a prison hunger strike. She absolutely deserved a nomination in a category where marquee names seemed to outweigh transcendent work (Cate Blanchett and Meghann Fahy were fine in mediocre shows; if Black Mirror weren't an anthology, Rashida Jones' role would've been classified as a guest appearance). But my frustration at her absence is also annoyance that FX's raw and timely adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe's nonfiction book on the Troubles was overlooked in favor of stuff like Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story and The Penguin.
Speaking of The Penguin, make this make sense: Colin Farrell earns a lead actor nod for growling under pounds of latex. Deirdre O'Connell gets a supporting actress mention for doing a broad imitation of Nancy Marchand's performance as Tony's nightmare mother on The Sopranos. (Both O'Connell and Farrell are great performers! But this is some of their least notable work.) The Penguin, simplistic as it is, earns more nominations (24) than any other show except Severance (27). Yet somehow there's no room for Rhenzy Feliz, who had to play opposite a protagonist whose face was buried in makeup and still managed—alongside duly deserving lead actress nominee Cristin Milioti—to give the series an emotional center?
5 Wonderful Surprises
Aduba elevates everything she appears on, and in the case of Shondaland's flawed but fun White House whodunit, her detective heroine is as crucial to the show's appeal as Lyonne's is to Poker Face. In lesser hands, an eccentric-yet-brilliant birder like Cordelia Cupp would've felt cartoonish. But Aduba brought out the human vulnerability behind the confident veneer, giving us a complex protagonist we could really root for to solve an otherwise forgettable murder case.
The creator as well as the star of this vicious, often wickedly funny Irish crime dramedy, Horgan deserves many accolades for delivering a second season that (mostly) worked on the heels of what felt like a perfectly contained limited series. In front of the camera, she's equally great as the eldest—and surrogate mother—of five raucous, haunted, profoundly trauma-bonded adult sisters. Horgan's Eva Garvey is funny and nurturing and grounded but also quite lonely and bitter, a character whose love and bile hold Bad Sisters together.
The Emmys sure do love Severance. But in Season 1, only the big-name actors—Adam Scott, John Turturro, Patricia Arquette, and Christopher Walken—got nominations, leaving some of the show's best performances unrecognized. This time around, pundits rightly predicted that their breakout co-stars Britt Lower and Tramell Tillman would finally get some acknowledgment. What they didn't foresee was that they'd be joined by Zach Cherry, whose expanded dual role as innie and outie versions of Dylan yielded some of the second season's most wrenching moments. Praise Kier!
I enjoyed Tina Fey's update of the '80s Alan Alda rom-com, but I would hesitate to call it her best work, so I can't really fault the Academy for largely ignoring it. Happily, they did choose the right performance to nominate in the endlessly versatile Domingo's supporting role as an accomplished architect whose platonic-soulmate relationship with Fey's character and rocky marriage to a flamboyant Italian man give him far more depth than the typical gay best friend.
Look, do I wish Somebody Somewhere had been nominated in every single category it was eligible for? Do its dynamic star, Bridget Everett, and the magnetic presence that is Murray Hill deserve a nod just as much as Hiller? Should this show, canceled after three seasons, ideally continue for the rest of its characters' natural lives? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Still: Somebody Somewhere has never moved the Emmy needle in the past, so it's a thrill to see it get some recognition for its third and final season. And it's particularly lovely that the focus of that recognition is Hiller, who was so excellent in a role that doubled as the show's warm, steady, sneakily optimistic, heart.