Pack your bags — and your Emmy ballots — because L.A. and New York are heading into that late summer lull. With a mere three weekends left until the Labor Day holiday, both towns are in the process of shutting down for the August dog days before September creeps in on tiny cat’s paws with the final sprint towards the 2026 Emmys, not to mention the four major fall film festivals that traditionally set the table for Oscar season.
That’s why the past week saw a handful of pre-vacation FYC and premiere events on the TV side of things, culminating in this weekend’s second annual Televerse festival — the only officially-sanctioned Emmy event thrown by the Television Academy. It’s all in service of reminding voters to make their final picks before (or, more likely, after) they flee town for more relaxing surroundings. Phase 2 voting officially opens on Monday with all ballots due back at Emmy HQ by 10 p.m. PT on Aug. 26.
Meanwhile, movie folks are already logging those vacation hours since they’ll be back on the clock when the Venice Film Festival rolls out the red carpet on Sept. 2, followed in quick succession by Telluride, Toronto, and New York. But at least one fall contender took a cue from Simple Minds and hosted an event to make sure we wouldn’t forget about them.
Widow’s peaking
When the calendar flipped from spring to summer eight-ish weeks ago, Widow’s Bay was in the midst of its surge as a serious contender across the Comedy categories. And when nominations were revealed on June 22 — the second day of summer — the Apple TV sensation had a sensational morning, scoring 19 nominations including Best Comedy Actor for its leading man, Matthew Rhys, as well as Best Comedy Series. That was the biggest haul for any freshman series, surpassing the 18 nods for its streaming-mate, Pluribus.
But as George Washington once sang, getting nominated is easy — winning is harder. That’s especially true when you’re going toe-to-toe with the final season of a much-loved and much-lauded series like HBO Max’s Hacks, which received 24 nominations for its farewell edition. But the love for Katie Dippold’s genre mash-up hasn’t faded in the months since its Emmy coronation. If anything, it feels like the Widow’s cult has only grown; during Gold Derby’s recent stint at San Diego Comic-Con we made mental note of all the Bay-inspired cosplay, a clear sign of its sizable pop-culture footprint.
Small wonder that, not unlike the titular island’s storied sea hag, Widow’s Bay smells blood in the water. As the voting window opens and the Best Comedy race tightens, the Apple TV campaigners have been pulling out all the stops to convert the show’s 19 Emmy nominations into wins including an upset Best Comedy Series victory — an outcome that Gold Derby’s expert oddsmakers are warming up to based on how the series has been vaulting upwards on our leaderboard.
Comedy Series
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Margo’s Got Money Troubles
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Only Murders in the Building
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On Wednesday, the deep-pocketed streamer transformed the L.A.-adjacent Culver Hotel into the bedeviled Breakwater Inn, an immersive experience where award voters and media could mingle with Dippold and the cast — including Rhys and his fellow nominees Kate O’Flynn, Dale Dickey, Stephen Root, and Hamish Linklater — while dodging some of the show’s signature spooks.
The Widow’s Bay brain trust arrived fresh from a separate promotional event at the nearby AMC Century City, where they introduced a special screening of the first three episodes. The free, one-night-only fan event took place across the country, including theaters in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.
While the cast and crew worked the room, Gold Derby did some canvassing of our own, talking to TV Academy members about their assessment of the Widow’s Bay–Hacks showdown. Granted it was a small sample size — and everyone had been plied by branded swag bags, an open bar, and a New England clambake-themed spread — but almost to a person the voters were charmed by the Apple TV show and saw a path towards it winning Best Comedy Series, responding with variations of “It’s the show everyone is talking about.”
One attendee, sporting a cardboard facsimile of Patricia’s antlered crown, noted that Apple was spending lavishly to deliver the statuette to Widow’s Bay compared to HBO Max, suggesting that the latters’ war chest might be constrained by the pending Paramount-Warner Bros. merger.
We also chatted up several of Widow’s below-the-line nominees, and while they didn’t want to jinx their chances by predicting wins, they definitely sensed the momentum. “Around midseason is when really started to hear from people from every facet of my life,” casting director Emily Buntyn told us. “The word I get told a lot is ‘obsessed.’ They’re obsessed.”
There’s one category where Widow’s Bay won’t have to worry about Hacks slowing its roll. Rhys is the unanimous choice among our experts to win Best Comedy Actor, completely resetting a race that began as a face-off between Shrinking‘s Jason Segel and Only Murders in the Building‘s Martin Short — two perennial nominees who have yet to win the prize. Here’s another year where both of those actors will have to content themselves with being the bridesmaids rather than the bride.
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Martin Short
Only Murders in the Building
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Yahya Abdul-Mateen II
Wonder Man
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Talkin’ Televerse
Following that packed FYC event, the Widow’s Bay team will next assemble at their sold-out Televerse panel on Saturday — one of several gatherings where the tickets went like hotcakes. Panels for Abbott Elementary, The Pitt, The Bear, Pluribus, Shrinking and, yes, Hacks all quickly reached capacity. (There are still seats available for The Diplomat, starring Rhys’s partner in life as well as the Emmys, Keri Russell.)
Packed houses are what the TV Academy wants to see more of during Televerse’s second edition after Season 1 suffered the slings and arrows that can accompany freshman year live events, including late start times, small crowds, and a scarcity of food. The festival is also trying to market itself as being more than just a pre-Emmys shindig, hosting reunion panels for My So-Called Life (though Claire Danes and Jared Leto won’t be attendance — and given recent headlines, the latter’s absence is perhaps best for all concerned), Revenge, and Band of Brothers, along with spotlights for new shows like American Hostage and The Shards, and live podcast recordings.
But the Emmys will absolutely remain top of mind for everyone in those various rooms as it’ll be the last time that casts and creatives can make their pitch to voters before polls open and people scatter away from the Hollywood hills. In the face of the Widow’s Bay surge, Hacks in particular needs to aggressively close its case for why it should exit stage left with a ton of Emmys in tow. Sure, Jean Smart isn’t in any real danger of not going 5-for-5 as Best Comedy Actress, but Hannah Einbinder and the writing-directing nominees would like some insurance that they won’t be Bay watching their Apple TV rival take those statuettes home on Emmy night.
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Elle Fanning
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
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Quinta Brunson
Abbott Elementary
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The other panels to watch will be Beef and DTF St. Louis, which are locked in a nail-biting race for the Best Limited Series crown. Both shows boast A-list casts and a wide spread of nominations, which makes tea leaf-reading even more challenging.
Interestingly, Best Movie/Limited Actress contender Carey Mulligan, won’t be on the Beef panel and Best Movie/Limited Supporting Actor contender Jason Bateman isn’t attending the DTF get-together. While Bateman isn’t predicted to win — his co-star and fellow nominee, David Harbor, has the momentum and the hardware — Mulligan enjoys front-runner status in her group. Her absence from Televerse gives No. 3 contender, Love Story‘s Sarah Pidgeon, a chance to elevate her profile on that panel in these crucial final days, especially as the initial passion for the FX series has cooled considerably. Can Televerse make voters fall in love with Love Story again? Stay tuned…
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Sarah Snook
All Her Fault
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Sally Field
Remarkably Bright Creatures
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Claire Danes
The Beast in Me
A Tiger‘s tale
Back here in a steamy New York, talk of summer vacation spots weren’t on the menu during a recent Neon-hosted lunch gathering of journalists in honor of James Gray’s Cannes-premiering, New York Film Festival-bound crime drama Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson. Instead, all discussion about upcoming travel plans revolved around three destinations: Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.
Hitting every leg of that three city film festival tour is a tall order, especially with NYFF on the other side. But multiple writers had their Colorado to Toronto travel plans in order, and various strategies were discussed about how to navigate the overlap between TIFF press screenings and NYFF press screenings. (For the record, Gold Derby will have eyes and ears at all four festivals, so look for our coverage in the coming weeks.)
One person who doesn’t have to worry about the festival shuffle is Gray himself. By accepting the Opening Night slot at NYFF’s 2026 edition, Neon took Paper Tiger off the board for Telluride and Toronto berths. (Venice was never an option as that festival prioritizes world premieres.) It’s a bit of a bold gambit since it rules out pitching the film to the discerning cineastes that flock to Colorado’s top movie mecca — at least until Sundance comes to Boulder in January — or the appreciative TIFF audiences that hand out the still-coveted People’s Choice Award.
And since Paper Tiger emerged from Cannes seeming somewhat declawed, a positive reception at either of those festivals could have aided its relaunch. The movie could definitely benefit from a second wind — it’s currently sitting at No. 16 on Gold Derby’s experts-only Best Picture leaderboard.
But Neon is betting — probably correctly — that NYFF is the best place to give it that second wind. While he may hang his hat in Los Angeles these days, the Queens-born Gray remains an alum of the ’90s school of New York writer-directors who have stayed in the picture for three decades and counting; think Noah Baumbach, Nicole Holofcener, and Ernest Dickerson. And he’s got a history with NYFF audiences and critics that dates all the way back to his debut feature, 1994’s Little Odessa, which means he’s already a hometown hero in their eyes.
In fact, multiple members of the New York Film Critics Circle were present at Neon’s lunch, where Gray held court with terrific stories from the making of his 2016 jungle picture, The Lost City of Z, which played that year’s NYFF. (Fun fact: That’s the movie where then-new Spider-Man, Tom Holland, broke his nose while demonstrating some dance moves, an accident that the filmmaker says he’s entirely responsible for.) Not for nothing, but NYFCC-affiliated critics were among Paper Tiger‘s biggest champions when it played Cannes and have been beating the drum for it ever since. In other words, Gray should probably prepare multiple speeches for the group’s awards ceremony in January.
When we chatted with the filmmaker about Paper Tiger‘s festival roll-out, he noted that he would have been happy to have popped up at Telluride and TIFF had Neon chosen that route. And, funnily enough, he confessed to being a little scared about how the New York crowd might react to Paper Tiger‘s depiction of the city — a fear that’s rooted in some of the feedback he received when he took We Own the Night to NYFF in 2007 and local audiences had very specific complaints about the street-by-street navigation featured in the memorable rain-soaked car chase from that particular New York story.
“They’ll be like, ‘That’s not Gowanus!,” Gray joked when describing his nightmares of what New York purists might say about Paper Tiger. Luckily, there’s no Oscar for Best Cinematic Achievement in Geography… yet.
—Additional reporting by Marcus Errico and Kevin Sullivan
