NBC has submitted only 11 of Saturday Night Live’s 20 season 51 hosts for guest comedy acting Emmy consideration, leaving nine off the ballot as nominations voting gets underway. The missing names include Sabrina Carpenter, Matt Damon and Alexander Skarsgård.
The cutoff matters now because Emmy nominations will be unveiled on July 8, and the submissions help decide who can even compete for a spot. NBC put forward guest comedy actor contenders including Bad Bunny, Ryan Gosling, Harry Styles, Jack Black, Colman Domingo, Will Ferrell and Connor Storrie, while the guest comedy actress list included Amy Poehler, Olivia Rodrigo, Melissa McCarthy and Ariana Grande.
Carpenter was one of the season’s biggest audience draws to be left out. Her episode was among the more watched of the season’s hosted installments, even as NBC’s submitted group included episodes that drew smaller audiences and seemed, on paper, to fit the awards lane more neatly. Damon’s omission stands out for a different reason: he had previously been nominated for hosting in 2019, which makes his exclusion from this round harder to miss.
The viewing data underscores the split. The 11 submitted hosts averaged about 4.6 million viewers per episode, while the nine passed over averaged roughly 4.2 million. Grande’s December episode drew 5.4 million viewers, Rodrigo’s May show drew nearly 5 million and Skarsgård’s January episode drew 4.8 million, the third-best among the season’s reported numbers. NBC also submitted the entire season 51 main cast and featured players for supporting comedy actor and actress consideration.
That is where the friction sits: the show’s broadest crowd-pleasers were not always the ones NBC put in front of Emmy voters. Across the 17 performer categories, 1,573 submissions are in contention this year, down from 1,706 in 2025, and the field is crowded enough that the Academy’s rules will shape how many nominees make the final cut. This year, all six lead acting races will produce just five nominees because none crossed the 80-submission threshold.
For Saturday Night Live, the result is simple and immediate. Some of the season’s most visible hosts can still be remembered by viewers, but only the 11 that NBC submitted are alive in the guest comedy acting race when nominations are announced on July 8.
