Seth Rogen and his AppleTV+ show The Studio won so many Emmys earlier tonight that even Rogen started feeling a little weird about it.
“It’s getting embarrassing,” the Studio co-creator/writer/director/star said during his fourth and final trip to the podium, after the Hollywood inside-baseball satire picked up the award for Best Comedy Series.
By then, Rogen had already been honored for his acting and writing, and for co-directing, with Evan Goldberg, the show’s standout single-take episode “The Oner” (whose complicated making Rogen discussed with Corey Atad on this site back in March. Big night for the no-cuts community across the board—Philip Barantini won an Emmy tonight for directing another, significantly one-shotter, the Netflix miniseries Adolescence.)
Rogen—now tied with Making a Murderer’s Moira Demos, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Amy Sherman-Palladino and Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy for most wins by a single individual on one Emmy night—closed by thanking “every executive out there” and reminding everyone else to “Thank your executives,” because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from The Studio it’s that studio executives cannot survive by wealth and privilege alone and need awards-podium recognition in order to live.
The Studio, which scooped up a total of thirteen Emmys at this year’s show, came into the night already a big winner, after running the table with nine wins at the Creative Arts Emmys last week; with its dominating performance tonight it became the most-awarded comedy in Emmys history, breaking a record set in 2023 by The Bear. (Yes, in the comedy category. No, we’re not having this conversation again.)
It was presumably a night full of waffles, Music Dance Experiences and other tiered rewards back at the offices of AppleTV+—even as The Studio rocked the comedy categories, Trammell Tillman and Britt Lower both won acting awards for Severance. Tillman, a first-time nominee, became the first Black actor to take home an Outstanding Supporting Actor Emmy; Lower, whose first nom this also was, nodded to Helly R by reading her speech accepting Best Lead Actress in a Drama from a piece of paper with LET ME OUT written on the back. (Host Nate Bargatze mostly sent the same message using only his eyes, although the joke in the opening skit about how most people prefer football and Yellowstone to prestige TV was a quality burn.)
But in a tough break for the macrodata refinement team, the night’s most-awarded drama series was another freshman show, HBO Max’s The Pitt, already a winner at the Creative Arts awards for casting and Shawn Hatosy’s guest performance as Dr. Jack Abbott. At tonight’s show, Katherine LaNasa won Best Supporting Actress for her performance Nurse Dana Evans, Noah Wyle beat out Adam Scott for Best Actor and saluted health care workers while accepting in a tux by the scrubs couturiers at Figs, and The Pitt itself took home Best Drama.