78th Annual Emmy Awards (Jesse Collins Entertainments, Academy of Television Arts and Scleices, NBC-TV, aired September 14, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, September 14) I watched all three hours of the 78th annual Emmy Awards on NBC. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been interested in this – it’s an awards show honoring TV programs, most of which are on so-called “streaming” channels that are unavailable to me – but it was being hosted by one of my favorite celebrities: Mariska Hargitay, long-time (27 seasons and counting) star of the TV series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. I saw Hargitay on Jimmy Kimmel’s program promoting the show and appearing in a full-length black dress, the first time I can recall seeing her in anything other than the skin-tight pants she wears on SVU. (When she and Christopher Meloni co-starred on the first 12 seasons, I used to joke that SVU had two groups of fans: Gay men who thought Christopher Meloni was hot and straight men who thought Mariska Hargitay was hot.) On the Kimmel show she explained that her first name is pronounced “Marishka,” since she’s of Hungarian ancestry (her mother was movie star Jayne Mansfield and her father was Hungarian-born muscleman Mickey Hargitay) and in Hungarian the “s” becomes “sh.” (My husband Charles joked that if she was going to be that serious about using the Hungarian form of her name, she should call herself “Hargitay Mariska,” since Hungarians – alone among Europeans – put the family name first and the given name last.) The Emmy Awards were even more interminable than most awards show, because there were very few musical numbers to break the monotony of introduce presenter-announce nominees-give the Emmy to … Ironically, the biggest highlight of the show was a musical number: Reba McIntire doing a wonderfully heartfelt tribute to the late Dolly Parton by singing one of her more obscure songs, “Appalachian Memories.” The show opened with Hargitay doing a sort-of number, a parody of “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” (a hit for Joan Jett but which I later learned was actually written by two British men, Allan Merrill and Jake Hooker, in 1975 for a band they were in called The Arrows. Jett heard the song in 1976 while on a British tour with her first band, The Runaways, and tried to get them to perform it. When they refused, she recorded it twice, first in 1979 with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of The Sex Pistols, which went nowhere; and then with her subsequent band, The Blackhearts, in 1981, where it became her star-making hit) about the enduring appeal of television.

Mariska Hargitay isn’t that great a singer (neither was her mom, come to think of it, though in 1965 Jayne Mansfield recorded a halfway decent single called “Suey” with a then-unknown young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix) but she had enough of a voice to get the job done. There was also a nice version of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” sung by Noah Kahan with a discreet string quartet backing to herald the “In Memoriam” segment, featuring a number of people I’d heard of as well as a lot I hadn’t. “In Memoriam” was hosted by Macaulay Culkin, Dan Levy, and a woman whose name I didn’t catch paying special tribute to Catherine O’Hara, who played Culkin’s mother in the movies Home Alone and Home Alone 2. (I’m still amazed that Culkin’s incandescent performance in the 2003 independent drama Party Monster didn’t give him the boost he deserved and the entrée into a major adult career.) The surviving cast members of Charlie’s Angels, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Cheryl Ladd (the last of whom was a mid-run replacement for the late Farrah Fawcett Majors), appeared to present the award for Best Drama Series to The Pitt. The Pitt was created in 2025 by show runner R. Scott Gemmill, who appeared last night to accept its award, along with Noah Wyle (pronounced “Wylie”), who also stars, and John Wells. It was largely inspired by the stresses placed on emergency room physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021. Ironically, it’s being hailed as a ground-breaking portrayal of the stresses on medical professionals in general, and those who work in emergency rooms in particular, when in fact George Clooney got his big break on a similarly themed program, ER. (Then again Mariska Hargitay’s presentation on Charlie’s Angels had its own bit of first-itis; she said that as a young woman she watched Charlie’s Angels regularly and it gave her the idea that she, too, could play a hot-looking, sexily dressed police detective. Actually, her role on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit owes a lot more to Angie Dickinson’s part on Police Woman than it does to Charlie’s Angels, whose stars played private detectives, not official policewomen. And I remember an article I read in People about a decade ago in which Hargitay said she took the part on SVU because it was the first role she’d been offered who wasn’t a dumb-blonde sex-kitten character like the ones her mom had played.)

The big winners last night were the drama series The Pitt and the comedy Widow’s Bay, which I’ve never seen but judging from its Wikipedia page comes off like a part ripoff and part spoof of Jaws. Widow’s Bay (the location) is a New England beach town whose government is trying to promote it as a tourist destination despite the place being cursed by various thousands-of-years-old unseen menaces. Instead of a shark, the main threat to the Widow’s Bay tourist trade is an ancient octopus, and the show’s musical theme includes lots of gurgling noises that supposedly represent the octopus lying in wait, ready to ensnare any bathers who come too close to it. The last time I watched the Emmy Awards on September 20, 2020 the big comedy winner was a Canadian show called Schitt’s Creek, and by order of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), every time the show’s name was spoken, its logo had to be flashed on the air to make sure the audience knew it was the show’s name and not the vulgarism for excrement. Another high point of the show was the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award going to Michael J. Fox for both his personal and professional struggle against Parkinson’s disease; after he was diagnosed with it himself he organized a foundation to raise money and fund research aimed at improving the treatments for it and ultimately hopefully discovering a cure. I must admit I had a long-standing prejudice against Michael J. Fox because of his star-making role as the Right-wing son of two Left-wing parents on the TV sitcom Family Ties – I guess he was good enough in the role he convinced me his politics were really that terrible. I also resented the weird portrayal of him as essentially the inventor of rock ‘n’ roll in the first Back to the Future movie (he plays a lick at a school dance in the 1950’s that Chuck Berry hears, copies, and uses as the basis of his style; they even played him on with a bit of “Johnny B. Goode”!), but it was nice to see him again. I was a bit perplexed that he was being pushed in a manual wheelchair (made by the Drive company, which also made the rollator I’ve used occasionally since my knee replacement) instead of using a power chair (though maybe his Parkinson’s is so far advanced he can’t operate the controls of a power wheelchair).

I was also impressed that actor Matthew Rhys won two Emmy awards for acting, one on a limited series called The Beast in Me in which he plays a man whose suburban neighbor (Claire Danes) begins to suspect he murdered his previous wife, and one for Widow’s Bay. I was gratified that Stephen Colbert won for The Late Show on its last season, and surprised that Colbert came out wearing a full beard. He’d briefly grown one on the show just after he returned to doing it in front of an audience after the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions ended, only to announce one week in that he was shaving it because his wife Evie was complaining that it itched her when they kissed. (I joked that if I could learn to live with Charles’s beard, she can learn to live with his.) Another big winner from last night’s show was Pluribus, described on Wikipedia as “an American post-apocalyptic science fiction television series created by Vince Gilligan for Apple TV. Set and filmed primarily in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the series follows novelist Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), who finds herself isolated after an alien virus transforms the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive mind, which nevertheless seeks to assimilate her and other immune individuals.” Seehorn won an acting award for it; and Allison Janney, one of the few people on last night’s show I’d actually heard of before, won for The Diplomat, in which she played the title character who finds she’s in way over her head in her latest posting. The show lumbered on to a limp conclusion in which Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson did a thoroughly lame “comedy” routine inspired by a new Apple TV miniseries in which they play celebrities who discover they are half-brothers. They dragged this routine on to excruciating lengths before they finally announced the winner of the Best Comedy Series award – which, to utterly no one’s surprise, was Widow’s Bay.