When Your Friends & Neighbors landed a Best Drama Series Emmy nomination this week with nothing else attached — no Jon Hamm, no writing, no directing, no below-the-line nods — it felt like it had to be a first. Checking every Best Drama and Best Comedy Series nominee back to 2000, it’s not quite a first, but it’s rare enough that there’s only one precedent this century: HBO’s Big Love, whose third season made the Drama Series lineup in 2009 with nothing else attached.
That’s the entire list going back 25 years. Two shows, out of 349 Drama and Comedy nominees, 17 years apart.
Big Love wasn’t an Emmy stranger otherwise — the show picked up nine nominations across its five-season run, including three in a single year for its pilot alone (directing, casting, and main title design, all in 2006), a guest actress nomination for Ellen Burstyn (2008), another casting nod plus guest actress nominations for both Mary Kay Place and Sissy Spacek (2010), and a guest actor nod for Bruce Dern (2011). It just never lined any of that up with its one Best Drama Series year. Your Friends & Neighbors has a similar pattern in miniature: its first season picked up a Main Title Theme Music nomination in 2025 — its only recognition that year — but the show’s Best Drama nod is this year’s solo act.
The snub carries an extra sting because of who got left out this time: Jon Hamm. This is a man with 19 career Emmy nominations. He was nominated eight separate times for playing Don Draper on Mad Men — losing seven years running before finally winning on his eighth try, in the show’s very last eligible season. He picked up three more nominations for guest spots on 30 Rock, one for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and just last year was nominated twice in the same cycle, for The Morning Show and Fargo. Whatever show Hamm turns up in, voters have historically noticed him. Not this time. Your Friends & Neighbors got its Best Drama nomination, and Hamm — its lead, its executive producer, its reason for existing in some pitch meetings — got nothing.
And it nearly happened twice in the same year. Nobody Wants This made the Best Comedy Series lineup for the second year running — but its only other nomination this time was for music supervision. That’s a stumble from 2025, when the Netflix series landed three nominations, including Lead Actor and Lead Actress bids for Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. This year, both were shut out, along with everyone else on the show. One more snub and it would have joined Your Friends & Neighbors and Big Love on a list that, until this week, had exactly one name on it.
