Creative Emmy Awards celebrate major wins
Widow’s Bay the island may be cursed but Widow’s Bay the TV series is living the dream.
The freshman horror-comedy just broke a record for the most wins by a comedy series in a single year at this year’s Emmy Awards, which recognises the best in American television.
The series, which streams on Apple TV, swept the Primetime Emmy ceremony by picking up six awards including best comedy, which was every category it was nominated in, adding to the existing tally of eight it picked up during two earlier Creative Arts events last week.
Its total of 14 wins bests the 13 comedy Emmys record set by The Studio last year.
Widow’s Bay premiered in April and quickly built momentum as more and more viewers caught onto to its quirky and spooky vibe.
The show is set on a fictional island off the east coast of the US, where its smalltown mayor (played by Rhys) has ambitions to turn it into a tourist draw. The fly in the ointment is a warning from some of its residents that a centuries-old curse was about to activate again, putting everyone in danger.
Inspired by Stephen King stories, Widow’s Bay has a wicked sense of humour, putting its characters through encounters with haunted hotels, sea hags, bogeymen, a sunset drinks party gone very awry and a once-in-a-generation storm. There’s also a genealogy sequence no one will forget in a hurry.
Among its Emmy wins are for its three primary actors – Matthew Rhys for comedy lead actor, and Kate O’Flynn and Stephen Root in the supporting comedy acting categories. Series creator Katie Dippold won for writing while Hiro Murai was awarded for directing.
The show, arguably the best series of 2026 so far, certainly the most exciting newcomer of the year, has been renewed for a second season.
It’s widely assumed that Apple TV still struggles in the rankings of most-subscribed streaming platforms (in Telsyte’s annual report a year ago, Apple was lumped into “other”) but the tech company’s offerings have increasingly attracted critical and awards attention.
Its other awards favourites in previous years include Ted Lasso and The Studio.
This year, Apple TV won 28 Emmys overall, which also included gongs for Pluribus, Slow Horses, the Bad Bunny Super Bowl half-time show, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles. It was the most awarded network, beating out usual victor HBO, which won 21 Emmys.
HBO series The Pitt won the best drama series for a second consecutive year, as did its lead star and producer Noah Wyle, who again picked up best drama actor. The show claimed seven gongs overall, but no other acting awards perhaps in part due to many of its large ensemble cast competing against each other in the supporting categories, which may have cancelled each other out.
The Pitt fended off a late challenge from sci-fi drama Pluribus, which looked like it was in with a chance after its lead Rhea Seehorn won the Emmy for best actress in a drama and creator Vince Gilligan was victorious in the writing category. Pluribus won six Emmys overall.
HBO miniseries DTF St Louis won best limited series in today’s ceremony, and won a slate of gongs last week at the Creative Arts events including two supporting acting statues for Linda Cardellini and David Harbour, as well as for writing and directing.
The choice to bump the majority of the limited series awards to the second-tier ceremony was designed to save time, but the producers misjudged the runtime as it became obvious by the halfway mark of its scheduled three-hour slot that the show would run short.
It had raced through all the starrier acting categories early on, and ended up with added commercial breaks in the last hour, as well as asking final presenters Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson to vamp for time. The pair obliged, resulting in loose banter that seemed to stretch on forever.
Perhaps, after that drama, those excised limited series awards will be re-elevated next year.
It wasn’t the only production hiccup as game-for-anything host Mariska Hargitay proved to be divisive online with some of the planned comedy bits and musical numbers panned by social media users. A pre-recorded Law & Order: SVU/Taylor Swift crossover was particularly cringe.
Better received were the in memoriam tributes to Catherine O’Hara from her screen kids Macaulay Culkin, Annie Murphy and Dan Levy, as well as Jamie Lee Curtis’s emotional speech about the late Rob Reiner.
There were a pair of TV reunions onstage – the 50th anniversary of Charlie’s Angels featuring Jaclyn Smith, Cheryl Ladd and Kate Jackson and the 30th birthday of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanaz (technically, Buffy turns 30 next year, but apparently those maths didn’t matter).
Michael J. Fox received the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award for his advocacy on behalf of Parkinson’s patients, a disease he was diagnosed with at the age of 29, while the Dolly Parton tribute was nice but lacking in detail in terms of her contributions to the medium of TV (for example, her production company was responsible for Buffy, which didn’t come up).
Netflix had a more lacklustre year, claiming third spot on the network rankings, and few wins in the major categories.
During the Primetime ceremony, it picked up three acting wins – Rhys for lead actor in a limited series for The Beast in Me, Allison Janney for supporting actress in a drama for The Diplomat and Sally Field in lead actress in a limited series or TV movie for octopus movie Remarkably Bright Creatures.
Rhys has been an endearing presence this TV awards season and along with real-life partner Keri Russell was deemed the king and queen of TV, although he didn’t thank her in either of his acceptance speeches, although it’s unclear whether this was deliberate or not.
When Rhys previously won an Emmy in 2018 for lead actor in a drama series for The Americans, he joked that Russell threatened to punch him if he proposed to her onstage. With his two wins tonight, he is the only man to have the trifecta of lead acting Emmys across all three genres of comedy, drama and limited series.
Russell missed out to Seehorn, and while the latter is a deserving winner, you have to feel for Russell who now lives in a house with three Emmy trophies and none of them are hers, despite eight nominations (six for acting, two for producing).
What does she have to do to get one of those awards, having already carved out a career that includes three memorable TV characters (see also, The Americans and Felicity) when so many actors struggle to be remembered for more than their breakout.
The night’s winners largely stayed away from politics, no one mentioned Donald Trump or Gaza. But there were more general references such as Alan Cumming, accepting the award for The Traitors, who urged people to register to vote for the upcoming US mid-term elections.
The Pitt’s showrunner Scott R. Gemmell emphasised the importance of storytelling, and argued collective fiction was the last bastion of reality when people no longer knew what to believe.
When Gilligan accepted his writing award for Pluribus, he referenced the show’s premise of a world in which everyone got along because of an enforced hive mind.
“There is nothing weirder than our current reality,” he said.
“These past 10 years, you can’t write this stuff. I submit to you that a real world in which people get along is just as believable as what we’ve got now – and it’s achievable.
“We will never agree on everything, but we can show respect to one another, maybe even kindness, and we can stop listening to a relative few who tell us that that is for suckers, and who get their power dividing us.”
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