Once upon a time, the advent of May heralded both the end of Broadway season and the end the TV season. Just as the curtain would rise on the slew of late-inning Tony contenders, it would fall on a network television schedule that kicked off with a tidal wave of September premieres followed eight months later by a sightly smaller wave of May finales from the shows that had survived the Grim Reaper’s cancellation scythe.
While Broadway still largely operates on that fall-to-spring schedule, the one-two punch of cable and streaming has turned the television landscape into a year-round affair, with multiple new shows ready to launch just as others conclude. Granted, the end-of-May Emmy deadline does provide us with some kind of a seasonal marker, but there remains a strong sense of spillover when, say, a new season of The Bear debuts while the previous season is making its rounds on the campaign trail.
One May tradition that the TV industry at large hasn’t entirely abandoned (yet) is Upfront Week, where various outlets parade previews of what’s to come over the next 12 months — along with the stars and creative talent from said productions — in front of the advertisers who shovel them some much-needed revenue. And in addition to looking ahead, the networks and streamers can also conveniently look back, calling out the shows they hope will get a viewership (and ad $$) boost from Emmy attention. May 11 marks the official start of Upfront Week, but Gold Derby got a taste of what’s to come with one audacious early presentation.
The audacity of AMC
If you were alive and watching television during that decade-long stretch from 2007 to 2017, there’s a less-than-zero likelihood that you were tuning into AMC on the regular. That’s when the cable network lit up the the pop culture zeitgeist with home-run shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and the first few seasons of The Walking Dead, but also strong singles and doubles like Rubicon and Halt and Catch Fire. The spirit of that latter tech world show is very much felt in AMC’s big spring swing, The Audacity, just brought up to present day Silicon Valley instead of turning back the clock to the ’80s.
The stars of The Audacity — including Billy Magnussen and Simon Helberg — were among the stars that AMC assembled for its latest Upfront Content Showcase spanning the 2026-27 season… and beyond. They joined a guest list that included established network faces like the Anne Rice-verse trio of Sam Reid, Jacob Anderson, and Alexandra Daddario and such Walking Dead lifers as Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan, alongside big names from soon-to-arrive shows like Thunder Road‘s Dennis Quaid and You’re Killing Me‘s Brooke Shields, most of which hope to be in 2027 Emmy contention.
But The Audacity is gunning for spots in this year’s competition, as is Dark Winds, the perennially snubbed crime drama from George R.R. Martin and the late Robert Redford that millions of viewers love… only none of them appear to be Emmy voters. (For the record, we were told that the Dark Winds cast is busy shooting Season 5 and thus couldn’t join the New York upfront festivities.)
During the presentation, AMC gave The Audacity the A-list treatment, bringing out Rufus Wainwright to croon a cover version of the Beatles classic “Across the Universe” over a clip reel from the series, which they confirmed has already been picked up for a sophomore season. The network execs that Gold Derby chatted with also spoke effusively of the show, agreeing with us that former Daily Show staple Rob Corddry is doing stellar career-pivoting work in a dramatic supporting role.
But Halt and Catch Fire never really caught fire at the Emmys, scoring a lone nod during its four-season run, for the show’s main title design. The Audacity is lagging behind at No. 20 in the Drama Series race among our expert predictors, with the cast ranking outside of the Top 10 in the various acting races as well. (Corddry, for example, sits at No. 24 on the Drama Supporting Actor leaderboard.) The show’s best bet this particular cycle lies in below-the-line categories where it can potentially establish an Emmy foothold and grow its audience of voters along with its audience of viewers in Season 2. It’s not the way AMC did it back in the Mad Men and Breaking Bad days, but that’s the way the wheel turns.
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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
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The last Boys
The 2025-26 Broadway season had its own finale watch party over the weekend when the last Tony-contending musical and Tony-contending play — The Lost Boys and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, respectively — had their opening nights. Both openings also provided the final pieces of the 2026 Tony puzzle with strong word of mouth and precursor recognition assuring berths in those respective races. The stakes were particularly high for the vampires populating The Lost Boys, which is the only original musical in this year’s race to originate on Broadway without an out-of-town tryout. The show’s expensive price tag and origins as a 1987 Joel Schumacher movie also had some smelling blood in the water.
But as brought to life by director Michael Arden and an ambitious creative team — not to mention a cast of appealing young actors — The Lost Boys is the kind of grand stage spectacle that builds on the chandelier-falling, helicopter-landing theatrics of ’80s Broadway staples like Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon. At times, it almost verges on a magic show as you try to figure out how they accomplished a particular effect before another bit of fantastical stagecraft catches your eye.
It’s true that Broadway history is littered with the corpses of vampire musicals, but The Lost Boys has some of the fresh genre blood that made Ryan Coogler’s horror riff Sinners an awards monster. “Sinners was incredible, and it’s so exciting that The Lost Boys is coming out now,” Arden told us at a press event in February. “We’re drawn to vampire stories because it lets us ask question so what it means without the ever-present threat of death that’s part of being alive.”
Our expert prognosticators aren’t questioning The Lost Boys chances in the Best Musical race anymore. The show is guaranteed to be nominated and has a strong shot at winning over its closest competitor, the low-key charmer Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).
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Meanwhile, Joe Turner faced its own initial challenges breaking into the Best Play Revival race given the stacked deck of competitors ranging from 96-year-old June Squibb in Marjorie Prime to Carrie Coon headlining her real-life partner Tracy Letts’ unsettling portrait of paranoia, Bug. But Debbie Allen’s staging of the August Wilson drama — which features Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P. Henson — earned almost unanimously positive reviews and multiple nominations from Drama League and Outer Critics Circle voters. And as once seemingly sure things like Bug and Proof, starring Don Cheadle and Ayo Edebiri, have faded with predictors, Joe Turner keeps on coming… which will help it go all the way to the Tonys.
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The Devil you know
If May is the finish line of the theater and TV season, it’s the starting line for Hollywood’s summer movie race, which begins this year not with a superhero — but a devil. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is expected to get the warm weather moviegoing months started in high style thanks to the long, long afterlife of the 2006 original and the better than expected reviews for the rare legacy sequel that (mostly) justifies its existence. The original Prada has also been credited with making Meryl Streep a movie star all over again after she seemed to be edging off into supporting player territory in the early 2000s.
It definitely kicked off a Best Actress streak for the veteran of many, many, many Oscar ceremonies. Between 2007 and 2014, Streep received five nominations — and one win for The Iron Lady — in that category, bringing her overall count to 18 nominations and three victories. (She has since climbed the ladder to a record-setting 21 nods.)
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is unlikely to raise that count to 22, however. While some actors have scored a second nod for a second time around with a popular character, Streep doesn’t dominate the sequel in the way she does the original. In fact, Anne Hathaway’s second time around as Andy Sachs would seem to have more Oscar potential since her character deals directly with the drama that drives the Prada 2 plot — the plight of the modern American journalist.
The one repeat Oscar nomination The Devil Wears Prada 2 is likely to see would be Best Costume Design, which previously went to Patricia Field. But the closet now belongs to Molly Rogers, who worked with Field on the first movie as well as on the era-defining Sex and the City lewks that netted them multiple Emmy nods and wins. If voters ignore the designer that dresses Miranda Priestly, there will surely be hell to pay.
