It's always awards season somewhere, and the US just had a big set of nominations announced for this year's Emmys. In 2024 the awards ceremony takes place on Sunday 15 September.
One of the biggest winners at this stage (meaning the stage when no one's actually won yet) is The Bear – the stress-inducing show set in the kitchen of a family-run Chicago restaurant trying to go from scrappy to high cuisine.
In fact, it just beat a long-standing Emmy record by racking up 23 nominations for its second season, one more than the most any other comedy has ever managed (that honour had been held by 30 Rock since 2009).
This is great news for FX (which made the show) and Disney+, which is the streaming platform where you can catch it all – and it's also great news for you since The Bear's third season actually just came out, too.
That means you can race all the way through its acclaimed first two seasons and then check out its more divisive third, making your mind up as you go. We're not necessarily big advocates of bingeing, but The Bear's typically short episode runtimes make it extremely tempting in this case.
All of those nominations have started up a fairly common Emmy question, though – are its categories sensible? The Bear definitely has some really funny moments, but its tone hardly feels comic for much of its run, leading some commentators to dispute whether it should really be labelled a comedy overall.
That's for others to judge, but it's not the only show that's had a great showing at the nomination stage. Fallout on Amazon Prime Video has followed up its good reviews with 16 nominations, a great showing given its genre. Shogun added to The Bear to make for FX's strongest-ever year, too, with 93 nominations overall.
The real flowers go to Netflix, which gathered up 107 nominations between all its shows, to underline just how powerfully it's moving to be the best streaming service on the market. Apple TV+ was a little way behind on 72.
In summary: there's clearly been loads of great TV in the last year and loads of it is available to stream right now. If you want to check out the single most-nominated comedy(ish) series, though, it's Disney+ and The Bear for you.
