‘Widow’s Bay’ & ‘Pluribus’ Helped Apple Land Record Emmy Noms, Apple’s Matt Cherniss Says “Quantity Over Quality” Strategy Is Paying Off
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- Apple landed 87 Emmy nominations, placing third overall on just 31 show submissions compared to Netflix's 125 and HBO's 86, and earned three nods in both Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Comedy Series.
- Widow's Bay led Apple's slate with 19 nominations — including acting nods for Matthew Rhys, Kate O'Flynn, Dale Dickey, and Stephen Root — and was classified as a comedy, which Cherniss called "one of the scariest comedies I've seen."
- Pluribus collected 18 nominations, described as the most Vince Gilligan has ever received for a first season of one of his shows.
- Shrinking added nine nominations including one for Michael J. Fox, while Margo's Got Money Troubles earned eight with nods for Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nick Offerman.
- Matt Cherniss, Apple's head of programming, framed the haul as validation of a "quality over quantity" strategy, noting 15 different shows earned nominations across the 31 submissions.
- The Morning Show was a notable outlier with just one nomination after its 2024 Outstanding Drama Series nod; Cherniss said a decision on whether the next season will be its last is coming in the near future.
- Ted Lasso will return for next year's Emmys, though Season 4 is still in production and Season 5 has not yet started.
Why it matters: Apple converted nominations at roughly four times the rate of Netflix per submission, and with Ted Lasso, The Studio, and The Morning Show decisions all pending, the per-show hit rate is becoming Apple's most concrete competitive argument against the volume-first playbook that defined the streaming wars.
