Salva Mubarak Senior Features Writer

ICYMI, this year’s Primetime Emmy Awards nominations are out and they pack many big surprises this time.

The Television Academy, for the first time ever, announced the award nominees without acknowledging which network or platform led the list. But with Succession scored the highest nominations of the year with 25 nods across different categories, it was clear that HBO won the race just a few nominations ahead of Netflix.

It might not have won on that count, but the streaming platform’s most-watched show of the past year, South Korean drama Squid Game made history by becoming the first non-English language series to be nominated for an Emmy in the ‘Outstanding Drama’ category. Not only this, the show scored 14 nominations in total, including ones for stars Lee Jung-jae (for ‘Lead Actor), Jung Ho-yeon (for ‘Supporting Actress), Park Hae-soo and Oh Young-soo (for ‘Supporting Actors) and Lee You-mi (for ‘Guest Actress’).

The brutal drama about class differences and wealth exploitation joins TV shows like Better Call Saul, Succession, Severance, Stranger Things, and Yellow Jackets in the Drama category.

Aside from this, Zendaya also broke two records with this year’s nominations for her work in Euphoria as an actress and an executive producer. At 25, the actress became the youngest acting nominee to be shortlisted twice in the ‘Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series’ and the youngest ever producer to be nominated for an Emmy.

Other big nods of the year were Ted Lasso and White Lotus with 20 nominations each. Late actor Chadwick Boseman received a posthumous nomination for ‘Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance’ for his role as Star Lord T’Challa in What If?.

What do you think of this year’s nominations?