This year’s Emmys’ theme? Trying to keep it together.

By David Mack, CNN

(CNN) — When TV’s biggest stars walk the red carpet at Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles for Monday’s Emmy Awards, many of the frontrunners will have something in common. And, no, it’s not their designer outfits.

This year’s nominations have been dominated by characters just trying to get by.

Whereas the so-called Golden Age of Television was once overrun by stories of mostly white male antiheroes up to no good, many of this year’s Emmy frontrunners, across some of the biggest categories in comedy and drama, are regular people with good intentions trying to survive in increasingly dire times.

From the traumatized doctors on “The Pitt” navigating Trump era cuts and crackdowns, to the city officials on “Widow’s Bay” struggling to protect their small town from a force seemingly out of their control, to the “Abbott Elementary” teachers trying to educate their students in an underfunded public school, this Emmy cycle had a plethora of stories about average people striving to keep their heads above water. Think of prickly writer Carol (Rhea Seehorn) and reclusive storage facility owner Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) trying to cling to the last vestiges of a lost world in “Pluribus,” or medical-student-turned-tour-guide Annie (Shailene Woodley, now an Emmy-winner) hiding out in Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion following another doomsday event in “Paradise.” Even on shows that aren’t as literally post-apocalyptic — “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” “Your Friends & Neighbors” and “The Diplomat,” among them — we’ve seen people resorting to extraordinary means to keep the lights on as things fall apart economically, socially or politically.

“Everyone is struggling in different ways,” said Alan Sepinwall, the former television critic for “Rolling Stone” who now runs “What’s Alan Watching?” after going through his own layoff a year ago. “There’s this idea that we’ve got to figure things out because the system that we either grew up in, or the system that we heard about from the previous generations, is really not quite there anymore. So what do we do? ”

Earlier this summer, the New Yorker’s television critic, Inkoo Kang, described 2026 as “the age of Broke TV,” pointing to characters struggling with economic troubles on Emmy-nominated shows like “DTF St. Louis,” “Beef,” “The Bear” and “The Comeback” as evidence of “the emotional cost of living in a broken world.”

But 2026’s TV slate showcased the fallout of societies fracturing for myriad reasons. In “Task,” for which Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey are both nominated, cops and robbers alike in blue-collar Pennsylvania must grapple with substance abuse, familial breakdown and corruption. “Slow Horses” (among the best drama series nominees) follows a band of decidedly average, if not still heroic, spies contending with both terrorism and populism. Even “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” was, at its heart, the tale of an average woman swept into a world of politics and celebrity that eventually sent her spiraling.

Then there’s AI. “Hacks,” “The Comeback” and “The Pitt” all featured storylines in which well-intentioned characters must reckon with the changes artificial intelligence is having on their industries, for better or worse. Even the alien hive mind in “Pluribus” has been read as a metaphor for AI. “This is an anxiety that people in every industry are feeling,” Sepinwall said, “and it’s especially acute in entertainment.”

From antihero to anti-antihero

That TV shows should want to reflect their viewers back to them is not necessarily surprising, but the medium has often been a vehicle for stories of particularly unrelatable creatures making particularly bad decisions. The shows most often associated with TV’s Golden Age — such as “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” — all centered on characters who could often be unlikeable as they wrestled for dominance.

Brett Martin, whose 2014 book “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution” chronicled the rise of prestige TV, noted many of these antihero-led dramas of the late 2000s and early 2010s were obsessed with masculinity and power. “They were made by middle-aged men who were fascinated with middle-aged men and the problems of middle-aged men,” Martin said. “A lot of them have to do with a warring sense of being good or bad.”

But Martin believes those shows — many of which centered on men consumed with power and prone to giving in to their worst impulses and flouting rules— were also tuned into forces that gave way to the Trump era. “The last 15 years have revealed the extent to which those artists were prescient about the crisis that was coming and that has become America in 2026,” Martin said. “We live, in some ways, in the world that those shows were warning us about.”

It’s understandable, then, that both creators and audiences may be both bored with pugilistic protagonists and craving a form of escapism in the form of characters different from the Machiavellian elites of “Succession” or the political narcissists of “Veep.” “It doesn’t feel like a parlour game quite as much anymore,” Martin said.

Previously, that yearning for a counterbalance might have been served by feel-good shows with relentless positivity, like “Ted Lasso.” Now, though, it appears audiences are connecting either with shows that reflect their own struggles back at them or remind them that there are others out there working tirelessly to make things right.

That’s certainly the case for Monday’s most nominated show, “The Pitt,” which abounds in gore and trauma, yet still feels oddly comforting. “It’s a show about heroic doctors trying to do the best they can under a difficult circumstance,” Sepinwall said. “You watch it and you feel better about human nature, even as you’re being reminded of all the many complications and bad things out there.”

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