The Television Academy has announced additional rules changes for the 72nd Emmy Awards competition, including a restructuring of how nominees are selected in each category.
To align the nominations selection process across all awards categories and to allow for more inclusiveness in the recognition of excellence, the number of nominees per category will now be based on the number of submissions in each category. Emmy submissions for 2020 have increased by 15% over the previous competition year.
“The increase in submissions is a reflection of the number of new voices, new television platforms and a tremendous growth in content from existing platforms across our industry,” said Television Academy chairman and CEO Frank Scherma. “Despite production suspension resulting from COVID-19, there is a wealth of excellent work submitted for this year’s competition.”
The number of nominations in a category will be determined as follows:
- 1-19 submissions: A sliding scale between zero to 4 nominations
- 20-80 submissions: 5 nominations
- 81-160 submissions: 6 nominations
- 161-240 submissions: 7 nominations
- More than 240 submissions: 8 nominations
Comedy and Drama Series categories will have eight nominations each, regardless of the number of submissions received. Paired performer categories (i.e., supporting actor comedy and supporting actress comedy) will have parity in the number of nominations.
Finally, this new rule eliminates the previous 2% rule, which specified that in categories with five nominees, if the fifth and sixth top vote-getters were within 2% of each other, both would be nominated.
A full list of Emmy Rules and Procedures can be found here.
