It’s the question everyone in the television industry is asking: what does it look like when the very same organization that administers the annual awards to the best of television runs its own TV festival?
Meet the inaugural Televerse festival, making its way to L.A. Live from Thursday, August 14 through August 16. The first-of-its kind event will play home to panels or screenings for all the Emmy nominees in the Drama, Comedy, Limited or Anthology Series, and Reality Competition Program categories. And they’re not prepping events just for Academy members, but also TV superfans, like premieres of “The Rainmaker,” “Anne Rice’s Talamasca: The Secret Order,” and “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy,” reunions for “Bones” and “Queer as Folk.”
On top of all that, there’s industry panels ranging from The Future of Music Supervision and The Legal Future of AI in TV to workshops with television luminaries like Henry Winkler and Beau Willimon. And it will all be capped off by the return of the Television Academy Hall of Fame event, honoring Conan O’Brien, Viola Davis, Ryan Murphy, and more.
That’s quite the lineup, especially when considering that half of these awards contenders didn’t know that they would officially be a part of Televerse until the Emmy nominations were announced less than a month before the festival is set to roll out.
According to Television Academy President and CEO Maury McIntyre, who spoke to IndieWire on the phone a week before the festival’s big launch, Televerse is “a perfect extension of the Academy’s programs. We’ve set the gold standard in defining excellence in television, and it’s our 30,000 members who are making that television that so many other festivals are celebrating, so we thought we should probably be trying our hand at it.”
In the first part of the Emmys calendar, during which shows campaign for nominations (often referred to as Phase I), the Television Academy is the keeper of the FYC calendar. They organize which shows present a highlight episode of the season, usually followed by a panel with the cast and crew, and reception afterwards, on nights from March through mid-June.
But the second part of that calendar, when official nominees campaign to win, has not had any sort of centralized way to reach voters in an orderly fashion. Televerse is a solution to that, though those who run Emmy campaigns still question if it is the solution.
For example, when FYC events are on a nightly schedule, each show typically gets a primetime slot at 7 p.m. Anxiety is high for the studios when it comes to the lottery process by which they are assigned the dates they prefer (dates that would, hopefully, attract the most attendees).
When translated to a three-day festival schedule, it’s easy to imagine an even more intense, granular negotiation around which timeslots, hour-to-hour, go to which nominees. After all, for a local audience, an early morning panel all the way in downtown Los Angeles can sometimes be a tough sell.
“Literally the day after noms, we gathered all the partners together who had nominations, and they each got assigned a random slot in terms of saying, ‘You’re the first pick, you’re the second pick.’ And so, they selected their own times,” said McIntyre. “Yes, there’s a little bit of jockeying sometimes amongst themselves. ‘Hey, would you give me that slot? I’ll give you this slot.’ But generally, what we found is, they got the times that they had all selected, but they didn’t necessarily want to assign the specific program yet until they got a chance to go out and figure out who was available. So if you had four or five nominations, you had four or five slots you had to play with.”
Which categories are represented does not have as much to do with what will be on the Primetime Emmys telecast as much as what categories networks have already been putting their money behind. The most notable exception is no Outstanding Talk Series panels, despite McIntyre saying “they would be very popular panels, especially these days,” simply because “we were very concerned that you wouldn’t be able to get all of the talk show hosts there, and that might be unfair. That if Kimmel was there because he lives [in LA], but you couldn’t get Jon Stewart, or you couldn’t get Stephen Colbert because they were already doing the show or whatever, that didn’t seem like that would be fair. So, we thought, let’s table that for this year, keep talking about it, and maybe try to figure out a way to do it next year.”
Figuring out when to have the festival itself was a journey. “When we were first proposing Televerse, I’ll be honest, it actually wasn’t in this timeframe. We were thinking of owning the space between the Creative Arts and the Emmys. And then we got some pretty tremendous feedback from the industry that, ‘That would not work. Everyone was too busy. There was just no way. But wouldn’t it be interesting if you did it maybe a month earlier and took advantage of this opportunity to promote those nominated programs in the midst of all this other content that you’re doing?,’” said McIntyre. (That timing would have overlapped completely with the Toronto International Film Festival, which often hosts several nominees promoting film projects.)
Rashida Jones, Tracee Ellis Ross at Netflix’s ‘Black Mirror’ ATAS event held at the Saban Media Center on May 17, 2025 in North Hollywood, CaliforniaAraya Doheny/Variety
In speaking to various people involved in running awards campaigns, the preference seems to have been for an FYC calendar similar to Phase I, where the onus was on them to organize events. In such a tight timeframe between nominations and awards, that would remain tricky to navigate. McIntyre hopes that the Television Academy organizing a festival that only lasts three days does actually make things easier for its network partners.
“The business is in a bit of a turmoil. There’s just so much going on from contraction, etc. So one of the things that we were really focusing on with our partners as well was that we wanted this to be more turnkey for them. We wanted it to be a very even playing field,” he said. “We wanted it to be a very low cost of entry for them so that this didn’t feel like yet one more large marketing spin they would have to do.”
The FYC panels in particular also serve as an opportunity for the Academy to involve its wider membership in the Emmy race, even those who can’t vote. “We have very specific ticket allotments. So the FYCs are primarily for members because that is for our partners to get in front of voting members, but we did want to provide a way for some people to purchase tickets to those panels, and primarily that was actually for our associate members [who don’t vote],” said McIntyre. “But we know that our associates are coming up in the world and we want them to get more involved. We want them to be hearing the same kind of stuff that the voting members are hearing and getting educated on and how things are going in the industry.”
Henry Winkler wins Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for ‘Barry’ at the 70th Primetime Emmy AwardsMichael Buckner/PMC
Hence why there are various panels as well to showcase all sorts of jobs within the television industry. “One of the things that we really wanted to focus on was the breadth of the Academy. Again, we represent every profession in the television business, and we know not a lot of festivals actually will delve into so many different fields. So, as we were developing the program, our programming committee was really focused on, how do we make sure that we give some popular stuff?,” said the Academy executive. “So, the Art of Foley, working with Sanaa Kelley and actually having people understand, what does being a Foley artist really mean? Henry Winkler doing an acting class. We thought, how could that not be phenomenal and fantastic? We’ve got a whole panel for cinematographers and how they do the perfect frame. We have a panel for casting directors and how they cast comedy ensembles.”
As for how they determined what to premiere at the festival, where one of the primary audiences is TV Academy members, he shared, “Going into it, we knew that any type of sneak peek or premiere would have to be of a show that was not yet Emmy eligible this year. We didn’t want to get tangled into that, but we were happy to launch shows that would be eligible in the next year. The biggest challenge there, of course, is that many of the marketing departments for these shows, etc., had already assigned their strategies for how they were launching shows. So, we got a little bit of a light start on that.”
Ultimately, he said, “We’re hoping to build on that for future years. Now that we’ve established ourselves, we want to make sure that our partners are thinking about us when they are thinking about how are you launching a show in the fall for next year? We are a good place to do that, especially if you want to get in front of Television Academy members on a new show that you want to get buzz on.”
Phylicia Rashad at the Television Academy 26th Hall of Fame held at Saban Media Center on November 16, 2022 in North Hollywood, CaliforniaMichael Buckner/Variety
There is hope that Televerse also solves the problem of how to better amplify the Television Academy Hall of Fame event, the last of which was in 2022, and has not been able to be an annual event since 2022. “We haven’t found the perfect home for the Hall of Fame in the past. Whether it should be in the fall, should it be in the spring, and it’s moved about. When we decided on this festival, it seemed like, ‘Well, that would be the perfect way to end the whole conference, is celebrating these iconic members of the industry that we are inducting into the Hall of Fame,’ and then, with our plans to keep doing Televerse, we could make it an annual event,” said McIntyre.
The Hall of Fame event has not taken on a fundraising element to it yet, outside of tickets and table pricing, but there is space for it to develop into something more akin to similar film awards events. “It does seem like the Governors Awards on the AMPAS side kicks off a little bit their final round, as well. That was in our thoughts too, that this is a perfect way of kicking off that second part of the season, if you will,” said the TV Academy leader.
At the end of the day, McIntyre is very enthusiastic about Televerse, and its greater implications on both the Emmys race and year-round Television Academy events, but there is an understanding that it is a concept that’s meant to continue developing. “One of the things we’ve been doing with this whole convention is we’ve been taking a bit of a crawl, walk, run strategy. This is supposed to be the crawl year. We feel we may be walking more than we’re crawling, but we wanted it to keep a little small,” he said. “If there’s one challenge we faced, it’s just the compressed time between nominations and actually pulling off the festival, but the actual doing of the festival, everyone’s excited about. And as we get closer and closer, the excitement builds a little bit more.”
As the festival was already born of membership feedback, the TV Academy President and CEO remains open to hearing from attendees on how the Televerse can grow and expand past its inaugural edition. “We’re all going to have a lot of debriefs after the festival to learn from them what worked, what didn’t work, what we can do better,” said McIntyre. “We hope to evolve it. We can’t wait. As soon as it closes, we’re going to be thinking about next year, so it’ll be exciting.”
