With final Emmy voting underway, the crush of last-minute FYC events have tapered off since TV Academy members started filling out their ballots this past Monday. But at least one show made one last effort to appeal to voters… through their stomachs. New York’s famed James Beard House — named after the iconic chef and cookbook author — hosted Bravo’s perennial Best Reality Competition Program nominee Top Chef for a five-course dinner rustled up by Season 23’s winner, Rhoda Magbitang.
Billed as “Island to Island” after the two water-surrounded enclaves — the Philippines and Manhattan — that Magbitang has called home, the event brought together media folks, literal tastemakers, and even one of the stars from Dick Wolf’s Chicago franchise on NBC. Naturally, Top Chef‘s top trio of current host Kristen Kish and longtime judges Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons were on hand as well, and they made it clear that they’re hungry for some Emmy recognition for the first time in a long time.
“Obviously we all want to win,” Simmons told us ahead of the dinner. You might say that she left no crumbs — much like the rest of us when we scarfed down Magbitang’s meal.
Soup’s on
“If you grew up in the Philippines, as I did, we eat a lot,” Chef Magbitang said at the top off of her Island to Island parade of dishes, which she specifically designed to follow the course of an average day in her native land. “I’m taking you through from breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, and then something sweet.”
As promised, the feast kicked off with a healthy serving of Lugaw Royale — a breakfast porridge-like dish consisting of chicken broth, butter-poached langoustine, some crispy chicken skin, scallion oil and half a hard boiled egg — and proceeded to keep in time with the 12-hour daytime clock. Snack fare included crispy shrimp and grilled slices of pig’s ear, while the lunch plate offered pork belly adobo, paired with a crispy lamb neck croquette and coconut-braised jackfruit (for our money, the highlight of the meal), followed by the dynamic duo of ox tail and tripe to bam pow our dinner cravings.
The “something sweet” denouement, meanwhile, turned out to be a fresh take on the traditional Filipino desert halo-halo paired with a rum-spiked coffee that involved setting part of the drink on fire. With each dish, attendees could taste that Chef Magbitang wasn’t content to rest on her Season 23 winners’ laurels — she wanted to win FYC season, too.
The same goes for the larger Top Chef team, who are well aware that despite being nominated for Best Reality Competition Program a whopping 20 times, the series was only won that category once — and that was back in 2010, before before Season 10 champ Kish took over hosting duties from Padma Lakshmi in the 21st season. “It would mean so much for our show to win,” Kish said candidly. “I think it’s about time. It’s an outstanding show.”
Gold Derby experts don’t see an upset on the menu, though. The reality juggernaut that is The Traitors is handily leading all its category rivals, even Survivor‘s heavily-hyped 50th season. Like Top Chef, that show is in the NBCUniversal family — Bravo wasn’t among the cable channels exiled to the Versant spin-off — so the Peacock network wins either way. But Colicchio, for one, would like Emmy voters to consider the difficulty level between producing a studio-bound reality show like The Traitors and an on-location series such as Top Chef, which spend its 23rd edition in the Carolinas.
“Our show is much more difficult to shoot,” he argues. “You’re on the road, you’ve got to pick up and build kitchens and move a crew. I don’t know if the average voter understands how hard that is. I think they should take that into consideration.”
Kish is also up for Best Reality Host where Alan Cumming is tipped to win a third statuette for putting up with all those Traitors. “It would mean so much for Kristen to win as host,” Colicchio says, and Kish agrees that would be an “outstanding” outcome.
“I competed on Top Chef — I’m a competitive person,” she adds. “It’s a little bit more challenging and less pressurized to win when it’s out of my control. Competing on Top Chef, I’m in control of what I’m making. With the Emmys, I’m happy to be nominated and then if a win comes along, great. But I also don’t understand how it all works, so I’m happy to be in the room no matter what.”
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“The subtlety and nuance of Top Chef is exactly why I think it is special and why it should be recognized as an Emmy winner again,” she adds. “But I also think that’s why it’s sometimes getting lost in the mix of our fellow nominees.”
The good news is that Top Chef will almost certainly be back in the reality mix for Season 24, and while Bravo hasn’t officially ordered a 25th edition, it’s hard to imagine that the series won’t get to celebrate that major milestone. And maybe by then, voters will have had their fill of The Traitors and be ready to tuck into some good old fashioned comfort food.
A Televerse tell-all
The food was scarcer — and featured far fewer pig’s ears — at Televerse 26, the TV Academy’s second attempt at mounting its own FYC extravaganza. (Funnily enough, Top Chef had its own panel there, but they didn’t bring any of Chef Magbitang’s vittles to share with the class.) Last year’s inagural edition wasn’t quite ready for primetime, with Gold Derby making mental note of all the tell-tale signs of a freshman year event, including half-empty ballrooms and talent delays.
Fortunately, the second season felt smoother overall, although not entirely hiccup free. The downtown L.A. location remains an issue, the press lines were a headache, and while some panels were packed, others had too-ample seating. Televerse admirably tries to spread the wealth — and bring in some wealth to the TV Academy — by opening its doors to both Emmy voters and the general public.
But that contributes to a split personality effect we observed throughout the weekend; as it stands now, the weekend is part of FYC event and part San Diego Comic-Con, and those two halves don’t entirely come together to make a satisfying whole. The fact that Televerse is surrounded by FYC events funded by deep-pocketed networks and streamers — like Apple TV’s lavish Widow’s Bay experience — also gives it the sensation of being an time slot filler rather than must see TV. But the TV Academy likely isn’t ready to give up on the idea just yet, so let’s see what Season 3 has in store this time next year.
Speaking of Widow’s Bay, the show’s packed Televerse panel was one of the weekend’s hottest tickets with a vibe that really did feel like Comic-Con. (In other words, there was definitely cosplay.) Consider that the closing argument in an Emmy campaign that has seen it surge to the top of our Best Comedy Series experts-only leaderboard, besting the fifth and final season of Hacks. And while the HBO Max series still holds the No. 1 spot in our combined rankings, the Bay-mentum clearly isn’t just a New England myth.
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Now, before declaring this race over, remember that there are still some factors working in Deborah Vance’s favor. For starters, Hacks is a Hollywood satire, and those kinds of inside baseball comedies are generally home runs with Emmy voters as we just saw with The Studio last cycle. In contrast, you’d have to go all the way back to the obscure 1969 NBC comedy, My World… and Welcome to It — starring William Windom as a cartoonist whose work bleeds into his life — to find a Comedy Series winner that mixes wild flights of fantasy with laughter.
Hacks also boasts a cast — led by national treasure Jean Smart — that’s incredibly popular within the industry, and the temptation to send those characters off into retirement lugging a bunch of Emmys will be hard to resist. Whereas Widow’s Bay is only just getting started; Apple TV has ordered a second season that’s likely bound for the 2028 Emmys so they avoid competing with The Studio‘s return next year.
Regardless of how things shake out on Emmy night, the down to the wire Hacks/Widow’s Bay race has thankfully added some last-minute excitement into what initially seemed like a sleepy season where the latest seasons of Hacks, The Pitt, and Beef ran the table over and and all newcomers. Interestingly, the latter series is facing a bit of challenge in the homestretch courtesy of HBO’s DTF St. Louis, which has been quietly nipping at its heels in recent weeks.
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Are two upsets brewing? Ask the Widow’s Bay bog witch… if you dare.
Summer loving
Even as we spent the warm weather months monitoring the 2026 Emmy race, we also soaked up the rays generated by some early 2027 contenders that occupied the Memorial Day to Labor Day corridor. While those shows have to wait until next summer to start their Emmy campaigns in earnest, the upcoming Golden Globes and SAG Actor Awards will offer them a chance to draw first blood.
Both blood — and awards nominations — will flow freely for Apple TV’s 10-episode adaptation of Cape Fear. After the series debuted to solid, though not exceptional, reviews on June 5, it quickly blossomed into a summertime hit for the streamer along the lines of its 2024 potboiler, Presumed Innocent. Just as that show’s leading man, Jake Gyllenhaal, ended up in Best Movie/Limited Actor race at the 2025. Emmys, expect Javier Bardem to receive an Emmy nomination, and possibly a statuette, to give his No Country for Old Men Oscar some company.
While there’s been some debate over which radio-friendly anthem won the coveted “Song of the Summer” title, for fans of genre TV, only one artist reigned supreme: The Vampire Lestat. The third season of the flagship show in AMC’s Anne Rice-derived Immortal Universe franchise turned the volume up to 11 with a Manhattan premiere that doubled as a rock concert for star Sam Reid. That event launched what turned out to be a killer season for Lestat and his fellow vampires, and the hope is that all the hubbub made voters sit up and take notice.
If Reid’s spirited David Bowie-meets-Brian May act vaults him into the acting races at either the Globes or the Actor Awards, a Best Drama Actor nod could follow at the 2027 Emmys. The same goes for Jennifer Ehle, who joined the Immortal Universe this season and could parlay her two Tony wins into a Best Drama Supporting Actress nomination. At the very least, composer and lyricist Daniel Hart won’t be left singing the blues; expect one or more of the bangers he wrote for Lestat to be in the music races at the 2027 Creative Arts Emmys.
But the one sure-fire summer show that’s bound for next year’s awards circuit is Hulu’s Furious, which launched quietly at the end of July and rapidly built a devoted audience. Adapted from the 1987 big screen thriller Black Widow, the Liz Meriwether-run drama has a plum part for Emmy Rossum, who was famously never nominated for her lengthy run on Showtime’s Shameless. The series also has a host of respected supporting and guest players — from Hope Davis to Scoot McNairy — who can assert themselves early and often once the 2026 Emmys are in the rearview.
Look for Furious to start to flexing its Emmy muscles with multiple nominations at the first quarter TV awards that occupy the winter months. Once those results are in, Meriwether and Rossum can properly prepare themselves for one crazy summer.
—Additional reporting by Jaclyn Ben-Porat, Debra Birnbaum, Denton Davidson and Marcus James Dixon,
