Emmys 2026 Bring Mariska Hargitay and TV’s Biggest Races to Downtown LA

The Emmys 2026 will put downtown Los Angeles at the center of television’s biggest awards night on Monday, September 14, with Mariska Hargitay hosting from the Peacock Theater. For viewers in Southern California, the live ceremony begins at 5 p.m. Pacific on NBC and Peacock, giving the city an early-evening appointment with a field led by The Pitt.

The medical drama enters the awards with 25 nominations, ahead of Hacks with 24, Widow’s Bay with 19 and Pluribus with 18. Those totals establish the breadth of each show’s support, but they are not a scorecard for Monday alone. Emmy nominations encompass acting, writing, directing and numerous production disciplines, with many awards already presented at the Creative Arts ceremonies.

Mariska Hargitay at the 2025 Woodstock Film Festival. Photo: Colleen Sturtevant / CC BY-SA 4.0. Display size adjusted.

That distinction matters this weekend. The Creative Arts Emmys took place on September 5 and 6, before the main broadcast. An edited presentation is scheduled for FXX on Saturday, September 12, at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, followed by Hulu availability on September 13. Viewers catching up before Monday can therefore see work honored beyond the handful of categories that usually dominate awards-night conversation.

Hargitay arrives with a particularly personal connection to this year’s results. Her documentary My Mom Jayne earned her two Creative Arts Emmys, adding to the acting award she won for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2006. Her hosting assignment now follows a weekend in which her work behind the camera was recognized, rather than being only a return to the stage as a familiar television star.

In the drama race, The Pitt and Pluribus are among the central contenders, but the category extends well beyond that pairing. The Diplomat, The Gilded Age, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Paradise, Slow Horses and Your Friends & Neighbors are also nominated. The selection puts medical storytelling, political drama, period settings and genre television into direct competition for the same top prize.

The acting contests offer another way into that field. Noah Wyle is nominated for The Pitt, alongside performers including Sterling K. Brown for Paradise and Gary Oldman for Slow Horses. In lead drama actress, Rhea Seehorn’s Pluribus nomination places her in a group that also includes Carrie Coon for The Gilded Age, Keri Russell for The Diplomat and Zendaya for Euphoria. A program’s overall nomination count does not settle those individual races.

Comedy has its own crowded contest. Hacks and Widow’s Bay compete with Abbott Elementary, The Bear, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Nobody Wants This, Only Murders in the Building and Shrinking. That mix gives the category room for workplace ensembles, relationship stories and shows that do not fit neatly into a single tone. The result will be an award for one season’s work, not a verdict that those different approaches are interchangeable.

Among the lead comedy actress nominees are Jean Smart for Hacks, Quinta Brunson for Abbott Elementary, Ayo Edebiri for The Bear and Elle Fanning for Margo’s Got Money Troubles. Lisa Kudrow is also nominated for The Comeback. The lineup brings established Emmy figures and newer contenders into the same race, making the acting categories worth following independently of the competition between entire series.

Limited-series viewers have a separate set of titles to watch: All Her Fault, The Beast in Me, BEEF, DTF St. Louis and Love Story. These nominations offer a more manageable catch-up list for anyone who wants to explore the awards without committing to several long-running shows. They also help explain why the evening can produce multiple, quite different accounts of what defined television this year.

The awards have also looked backward. The Television Academy presented I Love Lucy with its inaugural Legacy Award during the September 6 ceremony, bringing a foundational television comedy into a celebration largely organized around recent work. That recognition sits outside the competition between this year’s series. Viewers watching the edited Creative Arts presentation can catch up on a different strand of the weekend’s honors before Monday’s races are decided.

For Los Angeles audiences, the most useful planning detail remains the start time: this is a Monday ceremony beginning at 5 p.m. locally, not a Sunday-night broadcast. Peacock’s event listing confirms the downtown venue and live viewing arrangements. Anyone organizing a watch gathering should distinguish the main ceremony from the separately scheduled Creative Arts presentation, which honors a different portion of the awards.

The winners of Monday’s major races are still to be announced. Nomination totals and early awards can frame the conversation, but they cannot turn a forecast into a result. When the broadcast begins, the questions will be specific: which series takes its category, which performances are recognized, and how Hargitay guides an evening that brings much of the television industry back to Los Angeles.

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