Place Your Emmys Bets on Shōgun After Creative Arts Sweep

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Euan Cherry/Peacock, FX (Chuck Hodes, Katie Yu)

There was no bigger story out of this weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys than Shōgun. FX’s epic work of historical fiction set amid a dynastic conflict in feudal Japan won an astounding 14 awards, a near sweep of the 17 it was up for. Those wins — in categories ranging from Guest Actor to Cinematography to Costumes to Main Title Design to Stunt Performers — broke the all-time Emmys record for most wins by a TV program in a single year. HBO’s historical miniseries John Adams held the distinction since 2008 when it won 13 awards (including five at the Primetime Emmys). Every award Shōgun wins during this coming Sunday’s main telecast — and given the precedent set this weekend, you can expect a lot — will only extend that record further.

Shōgun also landed Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series, while The Bear won Casting for a Comedy and Netflix’s Baby Reindeer won Casting a Limited Series. Considering these are the three shows heavily favored to win their respective Outstanding Series awards, casting directors can fairly make the claim that a show’s success starts with them.

Speaking of where it all starts, every day on The Traitors begins with news of a murder (or, really, a MARE-duhr), as announced by host Alan Cumming, and it’s those kinds of theatrics that helped him win the Emmy for Outstanding Host for a Reality Competition Program. It’s Cumming’s first Emmy win in four tries, and since we’ve all got EGOT on the brain (more on that below), it puts the Tony-winning actor halfway there. Get this man on a cast album, stat! Cumming’s Traitors win also marks the first time RuPaul has lost in that category in the last nine years. It was part of a zero-for-seven showing by RuPaul’s Drag Race, all of which seems to be pointing toward The Traitors usurping the Outstanding Reality Competition crown on Sunday.

Besides Cumming, the guest actors and actresses were predictably the belles of the ball. And just as predictably, both Guest in a Comedy awards went to The Bear: Jon Bernthal made up for his loss last year by winning Guest Actor for season two’s “Fishes,” the same episode that won Guest Actress for Jamie Lee Curtis, who’d been widely predicted to win ever since season two dropped last summer.

In Guest Actor in a Drama, Shōgun triumphed again, this time with first-time winner Nestor Carbonell. The character actor, who was somehow never nominated for his enigmatic performance on Lost, won for playing sailor Vasco Rodrigues. In Actress, Michaela Coel overcame a ton of competition from her own show to win for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, her second Emmy win after Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series for I May Destroy You in 2021.

If Coel is an Emmys powerhouse in the making, she can look to Maya Rudolph as the powerhouse-in-residence. Rudolph picked up her sixth Emmy win in Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance this weekend, her fourth in five years in that category for voicing Connie the Hormone Monstress in Big Mouth. She’s now tied for most all-time wins in the category with Hank Azaria and Dan Castellaneta (both for The Simpsons) and Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy). Rudolph will also compete for Lead Actress in a Comedy for Loot on Sunday.

Here’s a pair of first-time Emmy wins that were fairly jaw-dropping — not because they won, but because they were first-time wins. Angela Bassett bested the cream of the crop in the world of narration (Morgan Freeman! David Attenborough!) to win Outstanding Narrator for Nat Geo’s Queens. Then there’s Sandra Oh, who had gone an infuriating zero-for-13 on Emmy nominations for performances including Grey’s Anatomy and Killing Eve, at long last becoming an Emmy winner as a producer of the Outstanding Television Movie Quiz Lady.

One of the TV movies Quiz Lady beat was Peacock’s Mr. Monk’s Last Case, a win that’s only surprising when you realize how much Emmy voters used to die for Tony Shalhoub in that role. The man won three Lead Actor in a Comedy trophies as that peculiar detective! This year, no acting nomination and an unrewarded end to the Monk saga. Between that and the Frasier reboot going zero-for-three, the 2024 Creative Arts Emmys were where the aughts truly ended.

A final congratulations to departing Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak for winning a for-the-road Emmy as Outstanding Game Show Host (a category that moved up from the Daytime Emmy Awards last year). This was Sajak’s fourth win off 21 nominations. Your move, Ryan Seacrest.

There’s that reductive meme that starts circulating every year around Emmys time about how The Wire — regarded by many very smart people as one of the greatest TV shows of all time — never won a single Emmy. It usually starts circulating when some inferior show or another does win an Emmy, a reminder that the world is a cold and capricious place. Anyway, The Idol won the Emmy for Outstanding Choreography for Scripted Programming.

Finally … that EGOT. The career milestone of having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. Rita Moreno has one. Mel Brooks has one. Tracy Jordan wanted one. And now songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul each have one after winning the Emmy for Outstanding Music and Lyrics for the deeply deserving “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” — co-written with Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman — from Only Murders in the Building. The wunderkind duo known to musical-theater folk as Pasek and Paul have been professionally young and talented for an infuriatingly long time, attending the University of Michigan as all those people tend to do and hitting Broadway in their early 20s and winning. They scored the GOT portions of their EGOT all within a 12-month span, with an Oscar for writing “City of Stars” for La La Land and Tonys and a Grammy for their Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen. Now they have completed the full set that eluded the likes of Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, and Stephen Sondheim in their lifetimes. The Wire never won an EGOT either.