Open AI’s Tech Talk Show ‘TBPN’ Makes Last-Minute Emmy Category Shift to Outstanding Variety Series (EXCLUSIVE)

And here we are, FYC season wraps up on Thursday as voting begins — although there will still be a few unofficial panels, events and freebies in the days after that, and I still have quite a few fun podcasts to post in these last two weeks. So now, get busy on finishing up those episodes and start voting!And let’s get going!

But now, in a late-breaking change, “TBPN” will instead be entered in the outstanding variety series category (I assume in the talk track), after “consultation with the TV Academy.” That means, yes, the three-hour daily tech and business talk show — hosted by Jordi Hays and John Coogan — will be up against shows like “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

“I grew up watching Colbert on ‘The Daily Show,'” Coogan said in a statement. “It would be the honor of a lifetime to lose to him at the Emmys.”

Added “TBPN” president Dylan Abruscato: “After starting my career at ‘Saturday Night Live’ and then leaving television for the tech world, I never imagined I’d one day find myself on the Emmy ballot in the Variety Series category. Building ‘TBPN’ has been a dream job, and I’m looking forward to seeing so many friends and former colleagues on the ballot.”

“TBPN” has 11 employees and debuted its talk-show livestream first as a weekly show in late 2024, then as a daily format starting in January 2025. The show, which originates from Hollywood weekdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. PT, has recently featured guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, Mark Cuban, Marc Andreessen, James Cameron, Ken Burns and others.

“Yes, everyone, I’m FYC-eligible!” Yang reminded the crowd during the Variety conversation in partnership with NBCUniversal.

When Yang earned his fourth acting nomination for “SNL” in 2025, he became the most nominated Asian male performer in Emmy history. He was hired as an “SNL” staff writer in 2018 and in 2021 he was the first “SNL” featured player to land an Emmy nomination in an acting category.He isn’t the only one who has left a mark on Lorne Michaels’ program.

Thompson, who won an Emmy in 2018 for co-writing the “SNL” song “Come Back, Barack,” is the show’s longest-tenured cast member, with 23 years under his belt, a run he calls “surreal.”

“We have a front-row seat to some of the greatest comedic minds in the world,” he told the crowd. “The show recreates itself every single week, and you have no choice but to go along with it. The rotating influx of talent, both writers and cast, allows for new ideas, friendships and collabs to form, and that keeps it pushing through time. I’m a witness to how the machine works. It’s not rocket science. They just hire whoever’s the greatest and most available.”

The panel also played a game of superlatives and prompts that turned into the cast roasting one another, and the members who weren’t there. Missing from the event were Michael Che, Jost, Mikey Day, Jeremy Culhane and Jane Wickline.

The ensemble isn’t the only thing in play for Emmy attention. The series is also competing for a slot in the outstanding variety series category, which merged earlier this year. Under the Emmy rules, one of the spots is guaranteed for a scripted variety program, the classification with the fewest submissions. The only entries classified as scripted variety this year are “Saturday Night Live,” “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” “It’s Florida, Man” and BYUtv’s “Studio C,” which returns to the submission deck this year.

Across every iteration of the variety and sketch category, the long-running comedy created by Lorne Michaels has not missed a programming nomination since 2007. The new category looks strange when these programs are judged side by side.

As the panel wrapped, marking the last “SNL” Emmy FYC event Yang will take part in as a cast member, he paid homage to the ensemble and crew at 30 Rock.

“I am in awe, and I go, ‘Holy shit, these people are doing this with no safety net,'” Yang said before getting emotional. “They are doing something incredibly difficult on a weekly basis, with a cadence where they get to show all of you, and me now, how much they improve at the skill. I really hope everyone considers that it is very hard to do this, especially now, when [comedy] is in very short supply. Thank you all for coming to my TED Talk!”

Joining the day were past “The Traitors” contestants including  Season 2’s Parvati Shallow (who brought her daughter Ama), Stephen Colletti (Season 4) and Sam Asghari (Season 3). A few more photos (from Griffin Nagel/Peacock):

Lee Sung Jin, the creator, executive producer and director of “Beef,” and Jason Bateman, who executive produced, directed and starred in “Black Rabbit,” sat down with Variety’s Clayton Davis to discuss their directing techniques and stylistic choices. Variety moderated this conversation in partnership with Netflix.

Lee – who directed one episode in “Beef” Season 1 – spoke about taking on a larger directing role in Season 2, saying he wanted to “push the surrealism a little bit more.” Bateman, who joined the Director’s Guild of America at the age of 18, mentioned that he grew up acting and began paying attention to sets at a young age, saying “I always hoped and prayed that I would get to a place in my acting career that would allow for me to raise my hand and see if I would be given the responsibility to try [directing] because it’s incredibly complicated and can be in a great way because you have an unapologetic seat at the table with every department.”

Read more here.

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Jason Bateman Talks ‘Black Rabbit’ and How Netflix Saved ‘Arrested Development’

In “Black Rabbit,” which is currently streaming on Netflix, Jason Bateman and Jude Law play Brooklyn-born brothers who reunite and get in business together. However, the two soon spiral into destructive patterns as they contend with their estrangement. To date, the show has earned nominations at the Golden Globes, Producers Guild, Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild awards.

Bateman says what drew him to starring in the show, and directing the first two episodes, was how unafraid the writers were to craft unlikable characters. “That is kind of a no-no in network television,” Bateman tells Variety‘s executive TV editor Michael Schneider during the “FYSEE Unplugged: Jason Bateman Retrospective” conversation in partnership with Netflix. “It’s kind of tough to find that there’s no one to really root for in this show because everyone starts so broken and so flawed and so ethically flexible.”

Read more here.

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‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Monster’ Directors and More Unpack Storytelling Techniques and Embracing ‘Weird Ideas’

The directors behind some of Netflix’s biggest hits of the year came together to speak to their creative processes and storytelling techniques in conversations moderated by Variety in partnership with Netflix.

Antonio Campos, who directed “The Beast In Me”; Max Winkler from “Monster: The Ed Gein Story”; and Alexandria Stapleton, director of “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” spoke with Variety’s Jazz Tangcay about their visual languages, the challenges of documenting an unfolding story and portraying real-life people.

Campos described his show as “contemporary noir,” saying, “we embrace weird ideas… I’m always thinking about the edit as the rhythm of the show and making it dynamic.” Campos said he and his director of photography, Lyle Vincent, often drew inspiration from 1970’s paranoia thrillers, like those from Gordon Willis or “Michael Clayton.”

Winkler also drew inspiration from films, like Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” when building the stillness and quiet of the plains, aiming to make Gein’s character appear small. Stapleton discussed the chaos and challenges of working on Sean “Diddy” Combs’ story as the grand jury trial unfolded in real time. “The other thing that we were fighting was that everyone was really obsessed with these really scandalous details,” said Stapleton. “[There’s] a whole doc about baby oil, and so we really wanted to dig under the hood to understand the context, the timeline, all of the origin story: how was this even possible?”

The Duffer Brothers and Marc Munden also appeared in a separate conversation with Variety’s Michael Schneider to discuss “Stranger Things” and “Lord of the Flies,” respectively.

Ross Duffer began by acknowledging the 10-year long process of making “Stranger Things,” saying, “Every year we were learning something new, trying something new, and trying to swing for the fences as much as we could.” Matt Duffer referred to wrapping the show as “very emotional,” and added that they tried to “tap into what it felt like in that first season.”

Munden explained the importance of staying as true to the “Lord of the Flies” source material as possible, saying, “I think the main difference is that you’re just getting much more of the characters, in a way, than in the previous adaptations, and my take on it really was to be true to that period of the 1950s, in the middle of the Cold War, and bring all those elements in.”

Read more here.

“It’s more meta than we tried to be,” Kudrow tells Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast. Adds King: “The second season we thought was going to come back right after the first season, and that did not happen, and here, it became our brand to be this thing that comes back every decade!”

“The Comeback” first launched in 2005, was canceled, then revived in 2014 — and then returned for a third and final season this past March. Again, they didn’t mean to do this, but “The Comeback” wound up being quite a chronicle of how the business has changed over the past 20 years. So why end it now?

“Because it’s a perfect piece,” Kudrow says. “It’s a trilogy, and that’s perfect, it’s completely full circle. First season, reality shows were an extinction event for scripted television. This one, it’s AI that’s an extinction events.”

Says King: “We’re always having potential extinction events, which create enormous fear and comedy. I mean, we thought reality TV was going to end narrative TV, and now it’s just like there’s another wing on the house that you go to if you want to see reality TV. We sort of posture at the end of this, we say maybe there will be incredibly well-received and emotional human shows, and then there will be shows with digital actors that people can leave on while they do whatever. We made room for it, because I think it’s real. That’s why we have a whole final series, because the threat is very real.”

On this episode of Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast, “The Comeback” creators Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King discuss the evolution of the series (and Kudrow’s character, Valerie Cherish), what they wanted to say this season about the threat of AI, and why they’re ending the show. They also look back at their first time in Variety, and take the Awards Circuit 10 Questions quiz. Listen below!

2. Something you loved as a kid but can’t believe you were into it now: Kudrow: “Candy dots. It’s just sugar!” King: “My grandmother used to make us something called ‘toast on the stove,’ which is she would put a piece of white bread slathered in butter on the open gas jet, and then take two scoops of sugar and put it on the toast. We would sit at a table like characters from a Dickens novel, eating toast on the stove, and then probably fall into a coma and a nap.”

3. Go-to Karaoke or sing-in-the-shower song: Kurdrow: “It’s different every time. I always think it’s interesting, why is this song on my mind today?” King: “I have to be careful because I don’t sing and I don’t think musically, so if I hear a song, it gets trapped in my head. Now I’m still hearing Adele, ‘should I give up or show I just keep chasing pavements.’ Which when we were doing the show, Lisa thought the lyric was, ‘should I give up or should I just keep chasing rainbows.’ And I thought that was so Valerie to spin it up, ‘chasing rainbows,’ but now that’s in my head a lot.”

4. Give me an alternate title for your show: Both: “Raw Footage.” Says King: “When we started our research, we got raw footage from ‘The Osbornes’ bootleg tapes, because I had somebody that worked on the show that I knew. That color bar we kept in the first season, everything started with that, because it was supposed to be like an assembly that was created by the second editor, not the final cut, but raw footage was the first thing. Because it was all raw footage, and that was how we defined what the show could be versus television, because we didn’t want it to look polished at all. We wanted it to look off.”

Adds Kudrow: “And how awkward it was really going to be!” Says King: “All that downtime that we saw when we looked at the ‘Osborne’ footage was just boring! And you could see people sort of trying to get something going, and so ‘Raw Footage’ was the first title, and we also thought we were doing it with one camera. Carolyn Strauss at HBO was such an advocate, she said maybe try two cameras.”Aren’t you glad now you didn’t call it “Raw Footage?” King is relieved: “Yes, because I don’t think ‘Raw Footage’ comes back.”

5. What’s your secret talent?: King: “I can wiggle my ears.” Kudrow: “I don’t have any!”

6. Favorite ice cream flavor: King: “Chocolate chip mint.” Kudrow: “I don’t like ice cream! Too cold. Even as a kid, I thought, why is this a treat? It’s milk! I hate milk. Just chocolate! That’s a treat. But frozen milk, that’s kind of bullshit.” So what is Kudrow’s favorite dessert? “I love chocolate chip cookies.” (“Friends” fans might note that on the show, it was Ross who hated ice cream — because it was too cold.)

7. The one item you couldn’t live without: Kudrow: “There’s too many! But Nicorette.” King: “My version of nicotine, which is television.”

8. What TV show in all of history do you wish you were a cast member of?: King: I feel like there’s a magical, ‘Brigadoon’ kind of bridge that I would have liked to have crossed to go into ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’ That felt like something new and warm, and I bet she was a great No. 1. It had all those great writers, and it felt like a charmed circle.” Kudrow: “When I was a kid, ‘The Brady Bunch.’ Or ‘The Partridge Family.’ I used to be like, ‘what if I could be in the Partridge Family? Wouldn’t that be great?’ I wasn’t acting, it wasn’t even a possibility.”

9. Fictional character you most relate to: [Not asked]

10. Your favorite piece of advice: King: “I tell writers all the time that there’s only one path, and it’s yours. Don’t think you have to have somebody else’s path, because they can all be very personal to them. Don’t compare yourself path wise to anybody else, and it’s easier said than done, but it’s a valuable lesson. As you start on the road to writing and showrunning, you look around and see how everybody else got there. But it doesn’t help, just keep doing you.”

Says Kudrow: “I had an acting teacher, and it was really just a cold reading class. It was about coping with acting, auditioning, and on TV and film, and it was something along those lines. Do what you do, and be your version of who that character is, and you at least have done a good job. The rest is none of your business. That’s your only job, and it’s really simple, so you don’t have to take it personally.”

Variety’s “Awards Circuit” podcast, produced by Michael Schneider, is your one-stop listen for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each week “Awards Circuit” features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives; discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines; and much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts. New episodes post weekly.

Here’s a confession that, well, anyone who has met me already knows: I’m not a sports guy. While others have fantasy football, I grew up putting together fantasy TV schedules and creating imaginary radio shows. Figuring out which TV pilots would be drafted to air and which middling series players might get cut from the pro primetime teams was my sport. Which network would win my Super Bowl, the end-of-season Nielsen ratings crown? I guess it’s good that I wound up doing what I do.

All of this is prelude to say: despite my lack of sports knowledge, I love me a good sports movie or TV show. It’s usually an underdog story, something we can all relate to — taking on what seems like an insurmountable goal to prove that, despite some setbacks or limitations, you’ve still got some fight in you.

And right now in TV, we’re seeing some great sports shows in the world of comedy. Actually, they’re some of my favorite series, comedy or drama, of the year: Hulu’s “Chad Powers,” NBC’s “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” and Netflix’s “Running Point” among them. Other standouts include NBC’s disappointingly canceled “Stumble” and Apple TV’s “Stick.”

TV has picked up the ball (pun intended) as Hollywood has turned its back to some degree on the classic sports movie. Who’s making “Rudy” now? Turns out, it’s television.

Read more here.

Netflix led with 22 nominations heading into the evening, but it was HBO Max that walked away with the most trophies at five. Netflix settled for silver with three wins, followed by Hulu, which was the only other platform to earn multiple prizes.

HBO Max’s “DTF St. Louis” was the only show to win more than one award. The suburban mystery took home Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series and Outstanding Supporting Performance in a Limited or Anthology Series for David Harbour.

The platform had another big winner with Rachel Sennott’s irreverent comedy “I Love LA,” which earned the Breakthrough Comedy Series award. The remaining series prize, Breakthrough Drama Series, went to Apple TV’s “Pluribus,” from “Breaking Bad” mastermind Vince Gilligan.

On the acting side, Tim Robinson won Outstanding Lead Performance in a Comedy Series for work in HBO Max’s “The Chair Company.” The supporting comedy prize went to Laurie Metcalf for her performance in Netflix’s “Big Mistakes.”

“The Testaments” star Chase Infiniti earned the lead performance honor for a drama series, and her supporting actor counterpart was Babou Cessay, who won for FX’s “Alien: Earth.”

Read more here.

Six months since the acclaimed first season finished airing on Apple TV, cast members Seehorn, Karolina Wydra, Carlos Manuel Vesga and Samba Schutte are still debating their take — and their characters’ choices — when it comes to life in a world where almost everyone is a part of the same hive mind.

“I love how [Mr. Diabaté has] the valid counterpoints to Carol’s arguments,” Schutte told Variety‘s executive TV editor Michael Schneider during a recent “Pluribus” Variety x Apple TV screening and conversation. “It’s true, as annoying as he might be, he has valid counterpoints. There’s no racism in the world, there’s no discrimination, there’s no war, there’s no crime. We can have whatever we want, we can be whatever we want. Isn’t this the world we all wanted?”

“There’s no consent! It’s fine,” Seehorn added with a laugh.

Executive producer Gordon Smith, who also worked with show creator Vince Gilligan on “Better Call Saul,” touched on the disconnect between Carol and the rest of the survivors: “Get 11 people in the world that you know right now in a room, see if you can get them to agree on something. It’s a challenge and I feel that’s one of the things the show is about – what a huge distance it is from me to you. What a huge distance it is to just talk to somebody and be outside yourself and see the world from their point of view. It’s almost an incommensurable distance.”

“I think the tension in some of these shows is that, by definition, a TV show is about people doing things,” he tells me. “And one of the biggest concerns that people have in L.A. right now is a reduction in the amount of activity in the city. Vacant businesses, population decline, affordability issues sending people out of the city and state, the loss of entire neighborhoods from the fires — all of it has led to, I think, a sense in the last few years of just a less vibrant city.”

Read and watch more here.

Sam Means and Robert Carlock, “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” (NBC)

1. Sum up your show’s pitch in one sentence.  A disgraced football star hires a disgraced filmmaker to make a documentary that they hope will put them both back on top.

2. What’s an alternate title for your show?  “Crazy American Football Man Movie Show (Italian theatrical release)”

3. What do we need to know before tuning in?  That it’s not a show about Tracy Jordan and Harry Potter being friends.  But it is the next best thing.

4. Give us an equation for your show. “Hotel for Dogs” − dogs + football + family − hotel

5. What’s the best thing someone said about your show? “Two or three times an episode, you will encounter a joke that is so perfect, so pure, so diamond-hard that you will wonder how it has taken human civilization until 2026 Common Era to discover it.” That’s from the NPR review, and we both now have it tattooed on our backs.

6. If you could work on any other series in TV, what would it be? That channel that’s on when you check into a hotel. We’re both really good at coming up with times for activities.  For example, just spitballing, “Poolside S’mores – 8PM.”

7. Finish this sentence: “If you like _______, you’ll love our show.” Megan Thee Stallion and Daniel Radcliffe hooking up in the back of a mail truck (and who doesn’t?)

1. Sum up your show’s pitch in one sentence. MAGA MILFs in the streets; murderous lesbians in the sheets.

2. What’s an alternate title for your show? It’s named after the novel so I don’t have to answer this one :) 

3. What do we need to know before tuning in? Please don’t watch with your kids in the room!

4. Give us an equation for your show. “Big Little Lies” + “Dallas” + “Succession” – “Succession” = “The Hunting Wives” 

5. What’s the best thing someone said about your show? “It takes a lot of smarts to write something this pleasurably stupid.” 

6. If you could work on any other series in TV, what would it be? “Succession”

7. Finish this sentence: “If you like _______, you’ll love our show.” Sex

The annual ceremony will take place on Saturday, July 25, at the Skirball Cultural Center. As for this year’s nominee totals, PBS SoCal landed 29 nominations; KABC/ABC7 received 21, Univision outlet KMEX received 20, Telemundo’s KVEA had 18, KNBC/NBC4 landed 15 and Spectrum News 1 had 10.

Per the TV Academy, the Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards “honor locally produced programs in the categories of Crime and Social Issues, Culture and History, the Arts, Human Interest, Sports, the Environment, and Live and Breaking News Coverage.”

For the station newscast awards, every TV station that submits is eligible. This year’s eligibility period was for the 2025 calendar year, which means many of the news categories were dominated by local coverage of the devastating wildfires that ripped through the region last January.

Last year, PBS SoCal (KOCE/KCET) led the 2025 L.A. Area Emmy awards with eight total, but the other big winner of the night was Telemundo’s KVEA-TV, which took home all three station awards for best newscasts — for daily morning (4 a.m. to 11 a.m.), daily daytime (11 a.m. to 7 p.m.) and daily evening (7 p.m. to 12 a.m.).

Go here are this year’s nominees.

Some other events on the circuit:

TUESDAY, JUNE 9
4:30 p.m. “The Daily Show” (NY)
5 p.m. “America’s Culinary Cup”
7 p.m. “The Pitt”
7 p.m. “Hot Ones” 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10
4 p.m. “30 for 30” (NY)
5 p.m. “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
7 p.m. “The Hunting Wives”
7 p.m. “Late Night With Seth Meyers”