Last year’s Streaming Watch analysis of the Emmy nominations showed a noticeable correlation between awards attention and viewer consumption, with Apple TV+ seeing a notable boost. This year, there’s a clear beneficiary of this phenomenon that stands above the rest, and it’s a single show: HBO Max’s The Pitt.
With seven nominations in the major Emmy categories (and 13 overall), the acclaimed medical drama was as much a hit with Television Academy voters as it was with general audiences. And the noms, in turn, fueled a ramp-up of audience interest in the show.
While The Pitt saw robust engagement throughout the first half of 2025 after its premiere on Jan. 9, viewership was finally subsiding by late June and early July. But its Emmy nods may have jump-started viewing again, with the show’s minutes streamed surging more than 200% from the previous week in the days after the July 15 nominations announcement, according to Luminate’s Streaming Viewership (M) tool.
The Pitt certainly benefits from its hefty runtime in a minutes-streamed analysis. (At 15 entries, its episode count is one of the largest for a single season of a streaming original.) But no other major nominees received anything close to the same bump in viewership.
Among The Pitt’s fellow Outstanding Drama Series contenders, the next biggest boost went to Netflix’s The Diplomat, with a 42% increase. The following charts measure the changes in the titles’ minutes streamed in the two weeks of July 11-24 versus the two weeks prior.
In fact, among all contenders in the big three categories (Drama, Comedy, Limited Series), the only title with a post-noms increase that even approached The Pitt’s, proportionally speaking, was HBO Batman spinoff The Penguin — and this may have had just as much to do with the July 11 release of smash DC film Superman.
On the comedy side, Netflix’s Nobody Wants This (already a massive hit) and Apple’s The Studio garnered the biggest surges, each rising more than 60%.
It’s therefore evident that, while Emmy nominations can bring new eyes to a series, the benefit among even the top nominees is widely variable. But for some series, including The Pitt, awards attention remains a valuable generator of viewer attention.
That is undoubtedly a positive sign for HBO Max as it struggles with a shifting brand identity and the streaming service’s parent company, which announced its intent to split in two next year.
To keep track of viewership levels among all the Emmy-nominated shows, be sure to check out Streaming Viewership (M).
