• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, July 14, 2023

The self-congratulatory press releases arrived Wednesday afternoon as the big TV companies tallied up their prime-time Emmy nominations across their many platforms.

This year’s prime-time Emmy nominations were led by the HBO series “Succession,” the most-nominated single show with 27 (among them, Brian Cox, above, nominated for Best Actor, Drama).

The nominations were announced Wednesday in Hollywood. “The 75^th Emmy Awards” are scheduled for Monday, Sept. 18, on Fox.

In the rush of press announcements on Wednesday, Disney claimed the top spot -- 163 nominations across 11 platforms, reflecting the breadth of its many content brands.

To be specific: The company reported 64 nominations for Hulu (the most-nominated of the Disney brands), 40 for Disney+, 54 for Disney Television Studios, 40 for Walt Disney Studios, 23 for Lucasfilm Ltd., 37 for FX, 28 for ABC-TV, eight for NatGeo, eight for Disney Branded Television, and a couple of others for content brand Onyx Collective and ABC News.

Add these up and you come up with a number far greater than 163, but give Disney credit for acknowledging that many of the nominations the company cited by individual platform were, in fact, shared by any number of its various entities.

Other announcements came in from Paramount Global -- 56 total nominations -- and Warner Bros. Television Group, encompassing the studios of Warner Bros. Discovery, with 41 Emmys,

This press release provided an illustration of the incestuousness (so to speak) of the TV business.

Because WBTVG is a sprawling unit of WBD that produces TV shows, many of its nominations are for shows that were produced for platforms and networks outside the WBD family.

Thus, many of the nominations they cited were for shows that were also cited for the same nominations on the press releases from other companies.

For example, two of this year’s nominees for Outstanding Comedy were made by WBTVG for Apple TV+ (“Ted Lasso”) and ABC/Disney (“Abbott Elementary”).

Another press release came in from another part of WBD -- HBO/Max. This one reported 127 total nominations, including the aforementioned “Succession.”

In the rankings of Outstanding Drama nominees, HBO Max’s “The Last of Us” was second with 24, followed by “White Lotus” (23, HBO Max), “Andor” (eight, Disney+), “House of the Dragon” (eight, HBO Max), “Better Call Saul” (seven, AMC), “The Crown” (six, Netflix) and “Yellowjackets” (three, Showtime).

In the Outstanding Comedy category, “Ted Lasso” was most-nominated with 21, followed by “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (14, Prime Video), “The Bear” (13, FX), “Wednesday” (12, Netflix), “Barry” (11, HBO Max), “Only Murders in the Building” (11, Hulu), “Abbott Elementary” (8) and “Jury Duty” (four, Amazon Freevee).

Each year, the list of Emmy nominees and Emmy categories noticeably increases, reflecting the explosion in video content and content platforms that has overtaken and remade television.

The nominees are so numerous that one begins to suspect that the Emmys are becoming like kids’ sports teams, in which every player gets a trophy.

An Emmy press release from the TV Academy this week noted that the Academy now has more than 20,000 voting members and that “this year’s nominations marked the highest voter participation in Emmy history.”

But cynics might wonder: With so much video content to consider now, how on earth can any of the voters possibly sample it all?