The 2015 Emmy Awards: Everything you need to know

For casual TV fans, Game of Thrones‘ massive Emmy sweep in 2015 — it won 12 prizes, the most for any show in a single season — likely seemed as if it were a long time in coming. After all, the show is one of TV’s biggest, and the Emmys’ reluctance to embrace it had seemed weird at best and biased against fantasy shows at worst. (After the Creative Arts Emmys — which were held earlier this month and reward below-the-line technicians — Game of Thrones season six has already won nine trophies, putting it well on its way to besting its record-breaking haul for season five.)

Similarly, Jon Hamm winning last year for Mad Men’s final season after eight previous nominations probably seemed to most TV fans like sweet awards justice after years of disappointment.

Game of Thrones is an enormous televisual achievement, which made this “aw, shucks” moment jarring — especially when Viola Davis accepted her award just minutes later.

With her win for How to Get Away with Murder, Davis became the first black woman to win an Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama. In a packed night of better than usual speeches, Davis’s acceptance still stood head and shoulders beyond the rest.

The 67th Annual Emmy Awards were always going to be a little bit weird.

Even aside from warmly dorky host Andy Samberg, there were a number of rule changes and new nominees that ensured a different set of wins than we’ve come to expect from the normally stodgy Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Jon Hamm has been nominated for an Emmy 16 times. Eight of those nominations were for Don Draper, the iconic character he created on Mad Men. (Four others were for producing Mad Men, with another four for guest actor roles on Tina Fey shows.)

And until Sunday, September 20, he had never won a single one of those Emmys. But on his last chance, Hamm took home the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series award for playing Don. Fey presented him with the award, and the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

After winning eight (8) awards at last week’s Creative Arts Emmys, HBO’s Game of Thrones continued its hot streak at the Primetime Emmys to officially win the most Emmys of any series in a single year, with 12.

The previous record holder was The West Wing, which won nine Emmy awards in 2002 (its first season).

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Talk Series, and former host Jon Stewart took the opportunity to explain how terrifying life is when you’re not on television.

“I have been off of television for six weeks, seven weeks, whatever it is. This is the first applause I’ve heard,” Stewart said to laughs. He went on to explain that other TV people don’t know how it is out in the real world. “There are tables with food, but you can’t take it!”

If nothing else comes out of the 2015 Emmys, we will at least have Andy Samberg’s password for HBO Now — at least until the Internet breaks it.

Host interaction is usually minimal after the monologue, but Samberg has dutifully popped up in between categories to deliver more jokes. This one, however, has a serious followthrough. Echoing parents and college roommates the nation over, Samberg gave out “his” HBO Now email and password for others to enjoy.

Amazon’s Transparent has been having a good night at the 67th Primetime Emmy Awards, winning prizes for direction and its lead actor, Jeffrey Tambor, in the early going. But what many viewers — including many viewers of the series — don’t know is that the show is based loosely on the real experiences of its creator, Jill Soloway.

Soloway’s own “moppa” (the term the characters in Transparent use to refer to Tambor’s character, Maura, who gender transitions late in life) also formed the basis of Soloway’s acceptance speech when she won for directing the episode “Best New Girl.“

Donald Trump has received an incredibly high level of media coverage compared to other presidential candidates. So much so that the Washington Post’s John Sides and others have gone so far as to say we should blame (or credit) the media for Trump’s high standing in the polls.

But in his opening monologue for the Emmys, Andy Samberg delivered a brief joke that does a brilliant job illustrating what that account leaves out — the Trump coverage has largely been of Trump saying and doing horrible things.

If your first reaction to the TV schedule is abject panic at just how much there is, fear not! 2015 Emmy host Andy Samberg feels the same way.

He opened the show with an energetic music number about the sheer volume of television that exists right now (aka “Peak TV”). As Samberg got more and more overwhelmed, he just decided to hide away in an underground bunker to get through every TV show. When he came out, he ran into Mad Men and Scandal stars Jon Hamm and Kerry Washington, who were less than enthused about speaking to a bearded, wild-eyed TV evangelist.

The 67th Annual Emmy Awards are being held Sunday, September 20 starting at 8 p.m. Eastern. While this awards show is generally known for sticking to tradition — like rewarding ABC sitcom Modern Family with Outstanding Comedy, which it’s done five times in a row — there are some factors that could make this show a slightly different experience.

Hosting duties are being handled by Andy Samberg of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the relentlessly goofy parody group The Lonely Island. He has hired the Comedy Bang! Bang! writers to help him out, meaning we can probably expect a high dose of absurdist asides and a musical number or two to keep things moving.

Like pumpkin spice lattes, the 2015 Emmys have arrived this fall as they do every year, stirring excitement and controversy.

So who are the most anticipated nominees? This new interactive map published by Google’s News Lab shows us which actors and shows caught our eye from July 17 to to September 18 of this year, by category:

The 67th Annual Emmy Awards are Sunday, September 20 at 8 p.m. Eastern on Fox. Brooklyn Nine-Nine star and former Saturday Night Live cast member Andy Samberg will be hosting (a.k.a. delivering a short monologue and quipping as quickly as possible between awards).

As with any awards show, there is no shortage of pre-show coverage, whether that’s backstage on the Emmys website starting at 6 p.m. Eastern, or E!‘s Countdown to the Red Carpet starting at 4:30 p.m. Eastern.

The 67th annual Emmy Awards arrive Sunday, September 20, to honor the best in television for the 2014-15 TV season. Though that might seem long in the past (the cutoff date was May 31!), it’s a long-standing tradition by now, the last big event before the fall TV season officially starts the very next day.

There will be a time for predictions of who will win the awards (and ours will arrive Sunday), but it’s also good to talk about who should win the awards, because we all know the Emmys will never make the right choice. We’ve gone through and made picks in every single category being awarded Sunday night, and all of our choices are absolutely correct and binding. If the Emmys don’t follow our choices, to the letter, you will know that they’ve gotten it disastrously wrong.

Every year, the announcement of the Emmy nominations brings with it a sense of hope for TV fans ... and then immediately delivers crushing, crushing disappointment.

The Emmy “system,” developed during an era when all of television was produced by three broadcast networks, has grown increasingly incapable of keeping up with the glut of good-to-great series airing in every notch of the dial. Consequently, nobody is ever completely pleased by the Emmy nominations, and the best possible reaction is usually, “Well, they could have been a lot worse.”

To the uninitiated, the Emmy nominations can look like a confusing series of weird choices. What makes one show a comedy and another a drama? What determines whether someone is a supporting actor or a guest? And why does American Horror Story keep ending up in the running for best miniseries?

The answer used to be that the Emmys were a wacky free-for-all, where actors and shows generally submitted themselves however they best saw fit. But in early 2015, after a 2014 Emmy season that featured several controversies over category delineations, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences added several new rules to clarify who could compete in which races — rules that made many things clearer and a few things much less so.

The nominees for the 67th annual Primetime Emmy Awards were announced Thursday, July 16 in Los Angeles by Orange Is the New Black actress Uzo Aduba and So You Think You Can Dance host Cat Deeley. The announcement began at 11:30 am Eastern.

The winners will be announced later this year in two separate ceremonies. The Creative Arts Emmys will be awarded at 8 pm Eastern on Saturday, September 19. The ceremony will be broadcast on FXX. The Primetime Emmy Awards will air live at 8 pm Eastern on Sunday, September 20. The ceremony will be broadcast on Fox.