The 72nd Annual Emmy nominations are out, and while you may have let such an announcement slide past your news feed in years' past, we know for a fact that you, like everyone, have been watching a lot more TV than usual while sheltering in place. To reward yourself for your staying socially distant, why not take this time to catch up on the buzziest of programs? We've compiled a list of the most notable and nominated shows below, and where you can stream them.


Watchmen
(26 total nominations)
We once asked "Is This the Best Show of the 21st Century" so it seems appropriate to see it nab almost 30 nominations. Regina King as Angela Abar, the nun with a motherfucking gun, should be a lock for Outstanding Actress in a Limited Series, as should Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score.
HBO Max

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
(20 total nominations)
And then there's this testament to privilege and blinkered self-absorption, which was good in its first season and has become increasingly more tone-deaf, annoying, unfunny, and mean-spirited with every successive episode. But the Emmys do this a lot: Reward a show once, and then just reflexively continue to reward it long past the point of relevance. That first season though? Still worth the love.
Amazon Prime Video

Ozark
(18 total nominations)
What started as a straight-faced, minor-key Breaking Bad riff for Netflix has become a loopier, backwoods soap-opera-styled variation on The Godfather, allowing Jason Bateman to really show off his skill as a director, and rightfully turning the show into a playground for Laura Linney and Janet McTeer's formidable talents.
Netflix

Succession
(18 total nominations)
Perhaps part of the reason Succession has become such a joy to watch is because another prominent American family—one we can’t avoid paying attention to—is so much more loathsome. But while the Roys are by-and-large despicable, they're not dummies, and they're not anti-heroes. They're gladiators on the floor of the arena—and watching the one percent of the one percent hack themselves to bits is a refreshing reversal of what it's actually like to live in America right now.
HBO Max

The Mandalorian
(15 total nominations)
It might seem a little weird that this show, which is mostly a Baby Yoda meme-factory, would get this much awards attention, but it can't be understated how huge an impact it's made both culturally and behind-the-scenes. It's not much of a stretch to say this show has changed the way TV will be produced going forward, much like Star Wars itself changed movie-making in the 1980s.
Disney+

Saturday Night Live
(15 total nominations)
One of America's greatest pastimes is complaining about how Saturday Night Live sucks now, and it'll never be as good as it was five-or-six-years prior. Five-or-six years ago they were saying the same thing, same as it was five-or-six years before that, etc. It's almost like the show is only consistent in how inconsistent it is, and all you can really count on is that every year features a handful of hilarious sketches and standout performers that deserve all the attention they get. Only now, here in 2020, you can just wait for the gold to show up on YouTube instead of having to sit through it all in real-time and getting increasingly frustrated that you can't mash Colin Jost in his giant, oh-so-punchable face.
Hulu, Peacock, YouTube

Schitt's Creek
(15 total nominations)
Like Battlestar Galactica before it, Schitt's Creek is a show whose title has always been one of its biggest stumbling blocks—trying to convince friends an endearing, progressive, and honestly lovely sitcom that needs to be seen is called "shit's creek" makes said endearing, progressive, and honestly lovely sitcom kind of hard to buy into. That first season doesn't help much either, often playing down to the easy joke of its title and coming off like a lite-rock Arrested Development. But hey: Books, covers, judging... cliches like that exist for just this reason: Schitt's Creek is well worth the binge, and while its final season still isn't streamable yet, there's not too many other shows that will make you feel as good as this show frequently does.
Netflix, IMDb TV, CW Seed

The Crown
(13 total nominations)
The third season of this sumptuous, elegant drama has it all. Amazing fashion. Heartstring-tugging emotion. Exquisite cinematography. A young, jug-eared Prince Charles and a feisty, loudly-dressed Princess Anne hitting the show like a pair of primly-primed firecrackers. But really, you can sum up the appeal of the most recent season of The Crown as such: You got Olivia Colman, and you got a whole mess of Corgis. It doesn't get better than this, folks.
Netflix

Hollywood
(12 total nominations)
Unlike most alternate history shows available to stream (Man in the High Castle, The Plot Against America, 11.22.63), Ryan Murphy's latest, Hollywood, decides against leaning into dystopia, and instead asks "What if the golden age of Hollywood wasn't so sexist, racist, 'phobic, and gross?" The answer: "It'd be pretty fun and fabulous—look at all these amazingly pretty people swan around for a couple hours." Is there an important lesson to be learned here? Probably not. Is there an "important lesson" to be learned from drinking champagne 'til you're dizzy and making out with hot people all night? Who gives a shit!
Netflix

Westworld
(11 total nominations)
(Insert the world's biggest shrugging emoji here, followed by about 13-15 alternating question marks and exclamation points.)
HBO Max

The Handmaid's Tale
(10 total nominations)
Margaret Atwood once said she based everything in The Handmaid’s Tale on something that really happened, and this claim of verisimilitude seems to be the guiding principle behind Hulu’s adaptation of her sacred text. It should be. Misogyny and public policy frequently intersect, and in this sense, Atwood’s story—about the handmaid Offred, whose fertility is used by the state to control her—is depressingly timeless. When Atwood says her story is rooted in a long-extant reality, believe her.
Hulu

Mrs. America
(10 total nominations)
This nine-episode series tells the story of the second-wave feminists who tried to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s—and the anti-feminist women who were ultimately successful in stopping them. The ERA campaign hinged on the novel idea that equality among genders ought to be written into the United States Constitution, and after watching this limited series, it's striking how little American politics have changed in the last 50 years. Oh, and the acting! Cate Blanchett, Margo Martindale, Tracey Ullmann, Uzo Aduba, Rose Byrne, Sarah Paulson; all of them should be delivering acceptance speeches in September.
Hulu

RuPaul's Drag Race
(10 total nominations)
This reality competition show, which has effectively replaced sports for large swaths of the American populace, may never win all the statues it deserves for being one of the most consistently, purely entertaining things on television since it first began, but it's sure nice to see it clear double-digits in nominations for 2020.
Hulu, Amazon Prime Video

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
(9 total nominations)
The nightly talk shows have been at the front line of the entertainment world's attempts to figure out how socially-distanced productions can work, and the one show that seems to have improved under these circumstances is Last Week Tonight. Maybe it's because John Oliver's style of comedy just works better when his delivery isn't being interrupted by (often forced) applause breaks and cheers, but there's a lot to be said for this version of the show feeling like a very smart and funny friend is visiting your living room and just going off.
HBO Max, YouTube

Insecure
(8 total nominations)
If you're not already watching the wholly excellent Insecure, then please! Readjust your priorities! The series, helmed by the amazingly funny and smart Issa Rae, is hilarious and real—plus it features a soundtrack that's damn near bonkers, it's so good.
HBO Max

Killing Eve
(8 total nominations)
Sandra Oh plays Eve, an American-born British agent on the trail of an ingenious and bloodthirsty assassin, Villanelle (an astonishingly good Jodie Comer), who’s leaving a trail of corpses across Europe. It’s refreshing to see the typically male-dominated cop-and-killer formula chucked aside in favor of the type of strong female characterizations that writer/creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge similarly exhibited in her acclaimed Fleabag. It's not as fun as it was in its first season, but this is still a must-see twist on the tried-and-true cops 'n' killers TV formula.
Hulu

The Morning Show
(8 total nominations)
So Apple TV+ wasn't a total waste of time and money, apparently? It's got this prestige show that's already won Jennifer Aniston awards for her performance as an AM-news anchor whose personal and professional world is upended by her co-host/husband (Steve Carell) getting hit with sexual misconduct charges. It's basic prime-time soap stuff until the last few episodes, which steps the gut-punch factor up exponentially.
Apple TV+

Stranger Things
(8 total nominations)
God, it seems like forever since the third season of this increasingly batshit supernatural-thriller premiered. For all the words spilled on how it fetishized the '80s in its first two seasons, the third is the season that feels the most authentically '80s; specifically, in how loud, disgusting, and unapologetically excessive it is. It's a sweaty, pop-eyed, John Carpenter-inspired cartoon of gross-out gags and charming-yet-inappropriate emotion expressed at the top of its lungs. The show always looked '80s—this is the season where Stranger Things legitimately earned its Reagan-era stripes.
Netflix

What We Do in the Shadows
(8 total nominations)
If you haven't seen the vampire mockumentary this FX show is based on, start there. It's arguably the funniest thing director Taika Waititi has ever made, which is no small feat. Once you're done with that, start this show, which is a continuation of the supernatural universe begun in that movie, centering on a completely different set of fussy, maladjusted vampires and their mistreated familiar. Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement is one of the showrunners, so the quality of the writing never dips, and Matt Berry and Natasia Demetriou star, so the performances are maybe even better than the movie's were.
Hulu

Better Call Saul
(7 total nominations)
How that number above isn't an eight, and how that eight isn't referencing the jaw-dropping work Rhea Seehorn is turning in on every episode is currently one of pop-culture's greatest mysteries. This most recent season of Saul is the one that caused a whole lot of people to realize that this might be (probably is) the single greatest spinoff in TV history, the Godfather Part II to Breaking Bad's The Godfather.
Netflix

Queer Eye
(7 total nominations)
As we've said before, "Smooth-Brained Reality TV is Here to Stay" and the revival of Queer Eye, starring Karamo, Jonathan, Tan, Bobby, and Antoni, is one of the best—and most rewarding—examples of why that is.
Netflix

Cheer
(6 total nominations)
Is it a "docuseries?" Is it a "reality show?" Whatever the hell it is, it's compelling—so compelling that Editor in Chief Wm. Steven Humphrey, from the day it premiered until... well, he's still doing it, so until you read this—would begin all conversations with the question "Have you seen Cheer yet?" If you haven't, the pitch is basically "Friday Night Lights, but for cheerleaders," and there is apparently not a single human emotion this show won't wring out of you over the course of its run.
Netflix

Dave Chappelle: Sticks & Stones
(6 total nominations)
Wait, the hackiest and most transphobic thing Dave's ever done got six nominations? Jesus. That decision is less than a day old and it's already aged worse than both sidewalk milk and that knee-length designer T-shirt Dave's "rocking" in the poster for this supremely disappointing stand-up special.
Netflix

Euphoria
(6 total nominations)
Are all six of these Euphoria nominations for Zendaya, rewarding her in six distinct ways for sustained levels of unique Zendexcellence displayed throughout the show's brief-yet-tempestuous run through every last tumbler in its emotional wringer? And if not, why not?
HBO Max

Pose
(6 total nominations)
Of all the breakout-successful, paradigm-altering television productions Ryan Murphy is responsible for—most of which are some combination of deliciously irresponsible and contagiously trashy—time will likely show that the most meaningful, substantial, and beautiful thing associated with his name will be Pose, a drama about the '80s ballroom scene in New York, and the way the people in it redefined family for themselves.
Netflix

The Good Place
(6 total nominations)
Would creator/showrunner Michael Schur's sitcom opus of optimism and philosophy, The Good Place, seem as rewarding and life-affirming if we all weren't currently drowning in lukewarm-chowder and frozen yogurt here in the Bad Place? It's hard to say. But it's almost as heartwarming and feel-good as the show itself to see the final season get such tasty, and just, desserts.
Netflix

Tiger King
(6 total nominations)
Sure. Why not. It's still 2020, after all. Let's hang a mullet on Emmy's neck, do some whippits, shave lines in our eyebrows and call it a night.
Netflix

Little Fires Everywhere
(5 total nominations)
Hulu's big, buzzy, original drama is this adaptation of Celeste Ng's best-selling book. Some reviews have knocked the adaptation for essentially removing all nuance from Ng's novel, and it's hard to disagree that the story is a lot louder than it was on the page; Ng's novel is set in the mid-'90s, but never quite channeled it. This show doesn't feel like the book... but the sour, entitled, pretty-on-the-outside-but-mean-as-fuck-for-no-good-reason vibe it absolutely nails from its first 15 minutes on? That's some genuinely authentic '90s nastiness; the kind of sunshine-covered bitterness these characters would snidely razz as they watched their umpteenth hour of Ricki Lake from the comfort of their couch. Beloved local filmmaker Lynn Shelton is nominated posthumously for the series, of which she directed four episodes.
Hulu