“Saturday Night Live” has won outstanding variety sketch series the last four years running, but now it will be up against talk shows too, like five-time winner “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.”
The Television Academy announced its rule changes for the upcoming 73rd Emmy Awards competition on Friday (Dec. 4) — and fans of NBC’s Saturday Night Live may not like the first one. Separate awards for variety talk and variety sketch series have been recombined into one category: outstanding variety series.
Saturday Night Live has won outstanding variety sketch series the last four years running. It was nominated the two years before that, but lost, in turn, to Inside Amy Schumer and Key & Peele.
By contrast, between 1976 and 2014, when SNL had to compete with talk and other variety shows in the overall outstanding variety series category, it won just twice: in its first season, 1976, and again in 1993. It was nominated a total of 19 times in that category in those years — impressive, but nothing like the torrid pace of the past four years.
