Emmy Awards: Who's Won the Most? (2024)

Unsurprisingly, SNL has won the most Emmys of any individual television show — it’s been around for a long, long time, and each generation of voters seem to love handing Lorne Michaels’ series statuettes. Its longevity and continued success, even as a variety show rather than a scripted series, is practically unheard of in the history of the medium. (If you discount soap operas, which are relegated to the separate Daytime Emmys.)

Turning to scripted shows, the comedy with the highest total number of Emmys is, unsurprisingly, the insanely-popular-in-its-day spin-off Frasier — a show remembered in large part for its intellectual sensibility, which made it catnip for sophisticated voters. Over the course of its run, the show won 37 Emmys with 108 nominations, including five Best Comedy victories; it outstripped its parent show Cheers, which took home 28 total Emmys with 107 nominations.

On the dramatic side, Hill Street Blues has 26 total Emmys with 98 nominations — edging out ER, which has 23 awards. But there’s a new king: In 2016, Game of Thrones became the most-awarded series in Emmy Awards history, with a totalof 38 wins. To date,Game of Thrones has won 308 awards out of 628 nominations.

Tonight, it is nominated for 32 for its final season (the most for any one season of a TV show ever). It already won 10 Emmys during the Creative Arts Emmys last weekend. And if Game of Thrones wins three Emmys on September 22nd, it will break the record for most trophies won by a single season. But who currently holds that record? Game of Thrones, which won 12 awards in 2015.

Congratulations, Cloris Leachman! The actress has won an insane eight Emmys for acting, including guest performances. (Carl Reiner has nine Emmys, but his total includes writing and producing categories as well.) Strictly as a performer, Leachman is legendary — with trophies rewarding performances on everything from Cher’s variety show and the Screen Actors Guild’s 50th anniversary special to guest turns on Malcolm in the Middle and the Touched by an Angel spin-off Promised Land. But she’s tied with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who also has eight. And if she wins on September 22nd for her final season of Veep (as is predicted), she’ll edge out Leachman as the most-awarded television actor in history.

Meanwhile, Ed Asner comes in just under Leachman with seven Emmys, five of which were for his portrayal of Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and spin-off Lou Grant. Moore herself also has seven Emmys, including a late-game win in 1993 for TV movie Stolen Babies.

Jon Hamm is currently on the last of his eight Mad Men nominations for Best Actor in a Drama, a ridiculously long losing streak that has probably gotten pretty frustrating for him by now. That Hamm keeps getting nominated is still representative of the way that, once the Emmys nominate someone (thereby recognizing their credibility/buying into their awards campaign), it's hard for them to be knocked off the pedestal — once you're in, you're in.

Other eight-time Best Actor nominees include Raymond Burr (for two shows, Perry Mason and the original Ironside), Peter Falk (for Columbo), and Dennis Franz (NYPD Blue). On the comedy side, Alan Alda, Kelsey Grammar, and Ted Danson each earned 11 nominations, as did Mary Tyler Moore. But the highest number of acting nominations in the same category is a whopping 12 in a row for Angela Lansbury for her starring turn in Murder, She Wrote.

In 2013, Louie star/creator Louis CK was nominated for nine different awards, ranging from writing to performing to directing to producing to editing to hosting SNL. Keep in mind that this could not have happened until relatively recently, both because of the (relative) ease with which someone can be a metaphorical one-man band and get something on the air, but also because several technical categories weren’t even recognized for years. (The editing categories are just over 10 years old.)

That same year, Tina Fey was nominated in seven categories as a producer, writer, and lyricist (for 30 Rock's "Rural Juror" song), as well as in a special category for the sitcom's webisodes and for her role in the telecast of that year's Golden Globes. This doesn't say anything about the state of the medium — Tina Fey is just ridiculous talented.

A full 33 trophies have been won for characters in law enforcement, including 20 for Best Actor in a Drama (four of which went to Dennis Franz for his role as Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue), three for Best Actor in a comedy (all for Tony Shalhoub playing Adrian Monk), and 10 for actresses — six of which went to Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless, the stars of Cagney & Lacey.

This ridiculously high percentage makes sense if you watch a lot of TV — after all, cop shows tend to dominate serious drama, with legal and medical shows rounding out the staples of a basic TV diet. Accordingly, 13 Emmys have gone to actors playing lawyers, including two recent pairs of Best Actress wins for Glenn Close in Damages and Julianna Margulies in The Good Wife, and many, many for doctors (mostly for Kelsey Grammer).

Meanwhile, 16 dramatic Best Actress trophies have gone to women playing characters defined primarily as wives, from women on older shows depicting domestic life (like Jane Wyatt's performance on Father Knows Best or Mary Tyler Moore’s role on The Dick Van Dyke Show) to Carmela Soprano — a fascinating character who often reads as a critique of the traditional TV housewife.

Glenn Close was nominated for five Academy Awards in the 1980s , but didn’t take home any of the major trophies until she won an Emmy for her role in Serving in Silence, a made-for-TV movie (she has since been nominated as Best Actress in 2012 for Albert Nobbs and 2019 The Wife). She also won two Emmys for Damages. It’s just the best example of the phenomenon of film actors, often long-nominated but without any hardware, moving to TV — whether for the additional creative freedom or, in some cases, awards bait.

Some other examples: Patricia Arquette’s career was primarily in film until she starred in Medium, for which she won an Emmy — long before collecting a statue for Boyhood. And Alec Baldwin was nominated for an Academy Award in 2003, but his primary source of shiny mantlepiece hardware is 30 Rock.

And that’s just in the lead categories; factor in the Guest Acting categories, and the number of big-screen actors dropping by TV shows increases quite a bit. Ray Liotta won his first major award for a guest turn on ER. Oscar nominee Laurence Fishburne (for What’s Love Got to Do With It in 1993) won Emmys for HBO movie Miss Evers’ Boys and an episode of the anthology drama TriBeCa. Monty Python’s John Cleese has been nominated for only one Academy Award (for writing A Fish Called Wanda in 1988) while winning an Emmy for playing marriage counselor Dr. Simon Finch-Royce on Cheers. And though Gene Wilder didn’t nab Oscars for acting (The Producers) or screenwriting (Young Frankenstein), he did go home with an Emmy for playing Will’s boss on Will & Grace.

That'd be ER's pilot, "Love's Labor Lost," which took home trophies for writing, directing, editing, and sound editing and mixing (and was nominated for multiple acting awards). Several other episodes have won four Emmys — notably Breaking Bad's stellar "Ozymandias" from its final season, as well as the very first episodes for Lost and Hill Street Blues.

It's a bit of an opposing lesson: Pilots winning awards isn't particularly surprising, given the way they lay the groundwork for a series, represent a specific vision, and often introduce many of a show’s most innovative elements. But "Ozymandias" comes all the way at the end of AMC's groundbreaking drama, playing off all of the tension the show had built up over and the nuances of the actors' performances. It's an indicator of how, as much as we increasingly think about it in terms of shows or seasons, television is still an inherently episodic medium.

Tracking the history of TV through the Emmys leads you through decades of only three networks, which is why NBC has by far the most Emmys of any TV distribution service (you can’t even just say "channel" or "network") with over 1,000, followed somewhat distantly by CBS with over 900. These are hard numbers for anyone else to catch up to — FOX has only been around since 1986, with its first nominations coming for The Tracey Ullman Show, followed by HBO in 1988 (which received nominations mostly for specials).

It's not surprising that, even though HBO had to make up for the other networks' 30-year head start, it continues to dominate the awards (it has over 120 nominations for the upcoming ceremony), with over 450 Emmys historically, including 99 wins just last year. It's by far the most successful cable channel, perhaps because subscribers pay directly for it in part for the prestige value associated with its shows being "not TV."

Most other cable networks are not so successful awards-wise — even AMC, which had runs with Breaking Bad and Mad Men, has struggled to place other shows. FX, the most successful basic cable network, was only nominated for 45 Emmys last year, less than half as many as HBO. (Historically, it's had hard time getting traction for any of its shows, with wins in the Best Miniseries categories but few wins for anyone not named Glenn Close.)

While streaming services appear poised to become the new HBO in this respect, attempting to deliver shows directly to the awards center of the brain. they, too, have yet to fully catch on, partially flopping with even its most prestigious shows: six for House of Cards and three for Orange is the New Black. But watch this space: In the next few years, this will be the "network" area set to start scooping up Emmys left, right and center.