No Squid Game? Or Patrick Schwarzenegger? This year's biggest Emmy surprises

The Guardian

16-07-2025

I don't know if you had the time or the energy to watch today's Emmy nominations on YouTube, but if you did – and you followed along with the comments in real time – then you will know that there was one glaring omission that has sent the entire world into a screaming tailspin of panic and terror. I am talking, of course, about Thanos from Squid Game.
For some, Thanos – a purple-haired Konglish-spewing drug-addicted rapper played by the Korean performer T.O.P – was the standout actor of the entire year, in any genre or format. But not only was this a bad result for Thanos, it was a bad result for Squid Game altogether. A show that comprehensively did the numbers for Netflix found itself being locked out of all categories. Still, at least it finds itself in decent company; Black Doves, Netflix's other wildly entertaining genre series, also found itself snubbed. As was The Handmaid's Tale, which is admittedly a little less surprising, given the amount of heat it has lost in the years since it debuted.
While we're on snubs, you have to feel sorry for Patrick Schwarzenegger. Pretty much everyone who showed their face on The White Lotus this year found themselves nominated as a supporting performer. And yet Schwarzenegger, who arguably went on the most dramatic emotional arc of the entire season, was left off the list. This is genuinely very sad, since he was perhaps the biggest find of the show this year.
While we're here, Renée Zellweger didn't get nominated for Bridget Jones (which was released as a TV movie in the States), and I would have liked to see something for Imogen Faith Reid. If you haven't seen Good American Family, it's worth it for her performance alone. Her role required some incredible modulation – she's 28, yet for reasons too convoluted to explain, had to play a character who was simultaneously seven and 21 – and for sheer complication deserved a nomination at the very least.
We should also probably pour one out for The Four Seasons and Poker Face. The former had a stacked cast, and yet Colman Domingo was the only nominated performer. And the latter, despite being a tremendous amount of fun, didn't get anything major at all. True, Cynthia Erivo was deservedly nominated for her incredibly showy guest spot as seven different credited characters, but Natasha Lyonne – whose central performance holds the entire show together – was snubbed. Similarly, the show wasn't nominated for best comedy. That said, since Poker Face is ostensibly a comedy but actually a murder mystery, this could be down to genre confusion.
Speaking of which, The Bear was nominated an awful lot in the comedy categories again. However, let's not hold out too much hope for it. After all, backlash over whether it deserved to qualify as a comedy meant that it lost to Hacks last year. And this year it faces stiff competition from The Studio which, like Hacks, will curry favour with voters because it's about show business. However, unlike Hacks, it is consistently funny and legitimately ambitious. In total, The Studio received 23 nominations across the board. If you're involved in any other comedy show this year, it might be a good idea to stay at home come Emmy night.
In all honesty, the same probably goes for the limited series categories and Adolescence. Netflix's virtuoso one-shot wonder is nominated for basically everything it qualified for, and surely Owen Cooper is destined to become the youngest ever winner in his category.
We haven't mentioned Severance, which with 27 nominations has the most of any show this year, purely because everyone who was nominated was expected to be nominated. This is with one possible exception. A lot of the online prediction articles failed to mention Patricia Arquette. The fact that she was nominated for best supporting actress shouldn't be a surprise – the woman's ability to turn from eccentric to volcanic on a dime remains unparalleled – but within the context of snubs she absolutely deserves her place.
Finally there are the anti-snubs; the nominees who probably didn't deserve to be there but were anyway. In truth, this year is essentially limited to Pedro Pascal, who found himself being nominated for best actor in a drama series. If you haven't seen The Last of Us look away now, but it's hard to fathom why Pascal was nominated in this particular category. Was he good? Yes, he was great. But he was also killed before the end of the second episode, which in terms of screen time puts him somewhere between a supporting actor and a guest star. Is it too late to swap him with Thanos?