Jimmy Fallon Suffers Embarrassing Snub During Emmy Nominations

One big name missing from the 2022 Primetime Emmy nominations Tuesday morning was Jimmy Fallon. The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon was not among the nominees for the Outstanding Variety Talk Series award. Fallon’s show has not been nominated for any Primetime Emmys since 2017 and hasn’t been included in the Outstanding Variety Talk Series category since 2016.

NBC was not completely shut out of the Outstanding Variety Talk Series field though. Light Night With Seth Meyers finally broke through with its first nomination in the category. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah are the other nominees.

Oliver’s show has won the category every single year since 2016, the year after the Television Academy split the Outstanding Variety Series award into Outstanding Variety Sketch Series and Outstanding Variety Talk Series. The first winner of the Variety Series category was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Fallon has only been nominated twice since the category split.

Fallon took over the Tonight Show in February 2014. Since then, the series has only had 11 Emmy nominations and just two victories, both of which weren’t even for a particular episode. In 2015, the show shared the Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media – Social TV Experience with Comedy Central’s @midnight. In 2014, the show won Outstanding Interactive Program.

The Late Late Show with James Corden joined The Tonight Show as the only two broadcast network late-night shows left out of the Outstanding Variety Talk Series field. However, Corden’s Carpool Karaoke series for Apple TV+ was nominated for Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama Or Variety Series. The others in that field include I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson, Late Night With Seth Meyers CORRECTIONS, The Randy Rainbow Show, and Stephen Colbert Presents Tooning Out The News.

The final season of Conan O’Brien’s TBS series Conan was also eligible for the Emmys this year. Unfortunately, the show’s only nomination came for Outstanding Picture Editing For Variety Programming for its series finale. The other nominees in the category are A Black Lady Sketch Show, The Daily Show, Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts, and Last Week Tonight.

In June, Deadline reported there was some concern among the late-night community that only four shows would be nominated for Outstanding Variety Talk Series. There were only 19 shows submitted, which meant only four shows were expected to be nominated. Those concerns did not come to fruition though, as five shows earned nominations. The 74th Primetime Emmys air on NBC Monday, Sept. 12.