The 77th Emmy Awards will be held on September 14, where the Television Academy annually recognizes and celebrates the best of American television. On Tuesday, July 15, the nominations were announced. Among those vying for the statuette are Javier Bardem, Harrison Ford, Pedro Pascal, and casts from standout series this year like Severance, The White Lotus, The Bear, and Hacks.

At 8:30 a.m. Los Angeles time, actors Brenda Song and Harvey Guillén, along with Academy president Cris Abrego, revealed the nominations. This year, Severance and The Penguin stand out. The Apple TV+ series received an impressive 27 nominations, while HBO Max’s series about Batman’s eternal foe garnered 24. The Studio and The White Lotus are also strong contenders with 23 each. The Studio matches the comedy nomination record set by The Bear last year. So far, no show has surpassed Game of Thrones’ drama nomination record of 32 in 2019.

Severance competes in the coveted Best Drama Series category alongside the third season of The White Lotus; breakout medical drama The Pitt; the acclaimed Star Wars spin-off Andor; the second season of thriller The Diplomat; the uncontrollable fungi of The Last of Us season three; Apple TV+ rival Slow Horses; and the surprise entry Paradise. Notably absent is the latest season of Squid Game.

The Studio is in the race for Best Comedy Series, competing against reigning winner Hacks, which dethroned The Bear last year, though The Bear remains in the mix amid ongoing debate over whether it is a comedy or a drama. Other contenders include Abbott Elementary, Only Murders in the Building, Nobody Wants This, Shrinking, and What We Do in the Shadows.

In the Limited Series or Anthology Series category, Adolescence received several nominations, competing with The Penguin, Dying for Sex, Black Mirror, and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story, which also earned Javier Bardem a nomination. Surprisingly, this is Bardem’s first Emmy nomination, despite six Golden Globe and four Oscar nods.

16 acting categories

The acting categories are among the most exciting, with 16 nominations across drama, comedy, and limited and anthology series categories (lead and supporting actor and actress), plus four unique Emmy Awards for Best Guest Actor and Actress in both drama and comedy, where there were some notable surprises.

In the drama category, veteran actress Kathy Bates leads the pack for her role in the detective series Matlock. At 77 years old, she is the oldest actress to be nominated. However, Keri Russell presents strong competition for the win for her role in The Diplomat. Also nominated are Britt Lower for Severance, Sharon Horgan for Bad Sisters, and Bella Ramsey for The Last of Us. Surprisingly, Elisabeth Moss, with the latest season of The Handmaid’s Tale, is left out.

As for actors, the race seems to be between Noah Wyle — who will receive his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next year — for The Pitt, and Pedro Pascal for The Last of Us, although Adam Scott could win for Severance. Also in the running are Sterling K. Brown for Paradise and Gary Oldman for Slow Horses.

Among the top contenders in comedy, Jean Smart — who’s been winning everything with Hacks (including last year’s Emmy) — is once again the favorite. She’ll face competition from Uzo Aduba for The Residence, Quinta Brunson from Abbott Elementary, and Kristen Bell from Nobody Wants This. Smart will also have to go up against Ayo Edebiri, who is nominated for her role as Chef Sydney in The Bear.

Her co-star Jeremy Allen White is also nominated for Lead Actor in a Comedy. A two-time consecutive winner for his role as the troubled Carmen Berzatto, he will face tough competition from Seth Rogen for The Studio, Martin Short for Only Murders in the Building, Adam Brody in Nobody Wants This, and Jason Segel in Shrinking.

In the category of anthology or limited series, Michelle Williams, who plays a cancer patient in Dying for Sex, will compete against Cristin Millioti in The Penguin, Cate Blanchett in Disclaimer, Rashida Jones in Black Mirror, and Meghan Fahy in Sirens.

In the race for Lead Actor in a Drama, Stephen Graham in Adolescence is the favorite, although he faces tough competition from Colin Farrell for The Penguin. Also in the race are Cooper Koch for his role as Erik in Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story, Jake Gyllenhaal for Presumed Innocent, and Brian Tyree Henry for the thriller Dope Thief.

When it comes to supporting actors, The White Lotus has received a number of nominations in the limited or anthology series category. Nominees from Mike White’s series include Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, and Sam Rockwell. From Apple TV+’s Severance come John Turturro, Tramell Tillman, and Zach Cherry, while James Marsden is nominated for Paradise.

It’s a similar story with supporting actresses. Katherine LaNasa leads with her role as the suffering nurse Dana Evans in The Pitt, but The White Lotus is also strongly represented with nominations for Carrie Coon, Parker Posey, Natasha Rothwell, and Aimee Lou Wood. Julianne Nicholson from Paradise and Patricia Arquette from Severance also received nominations. Meanwhile, Alison Janney’s portrayal of the cold Vice President Penn in The Diplomat was a surprise omission.

In the comedy category, the supporting actors come from a wide range of shows. Ebon Moss-Bachrach, soon to join Fantastic Four and last year’s winner, has been nominated for his role as cousin Richie in The Bear. He will be competing against Ike Barinholtz, who is a strong contender for his role as producer Sal Saperstein in The Studio. Also nominated are none other than Harrison Ford, receiving his first Emmy nomination for Shrinking, which also earned a nod in this category for Michael Urie. Colman Domingo received a surprise nomination for The Four Seasons and Jeff Hiller for Somebody Somewhere. Bowen Yang also scored a nomination for Saturday Night Live.

In the outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series, Catherine O’Hara and Kathryn Hahn, were nominated for their roles in The Studio, while Abbott Elementary also received two nods for Janelle James and Sheryl Lee Ralph. Rounding out the race are Hannah Einbinder for her role opposite Jean Smart in Hacks, and Liza Colón-Zayas, reprising her role as Tina in The Bear, for which she won last year and gave an emotional acceptance speech. Jessica Williams is also nominated for Shrinking.

Javier Bardem has a chance in the category of Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series. However, he faces tough competition from one of the year’s biggest stars: the young Owen Cooper, who plays little Jamie in Adolescence. Despite being the series’ central figure, Cooper was submitted as a supporting actor to increase his and Stephen Graham’s chances. At 15 years old, Cooper is the youngest nominee ever in this category. He will compete against his co-star from Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story, Ashley Walters, who portrays Detective Bascombe, a key character in the first two episodes. Also nominated are Rob Delaney for Dying for Sex, and both Bill Camp and Peter Sarsgaard for Presumed Innocence.

Adolescence also leads among the nominees for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, with Erin Doherty (best known for playing Princess Anne in the middle seasons of The Crown) recognized for her role as Jamie’s psychologist. She is joined by Christine Tremarco, who portrays Jamie’s mother. Chloë Sevigny, Bardem’s co-star who plays the Menendez family matriarch, has also been nominated. Rounding out the category are Deirdre O’Connell for The Penguin, Jenny Slate for Dying for Sex, and Ruth Negga for Presumed Innocent.

Now, the 24,000 voting members of the Television Academy are called to cast their ballots for their favorites. The winners will be announced during a grand ceremony on September 15, marking the official kickoff to Hollywood’s awards season.

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Eight months after being defeated by Ted Cruz in the Senate race, Colin Allred, 42, is back on the Texas political scene. The Democratic politician and former U.S. representative (2019–2025) has bounced back and announced a few weeks ago that he would run in his party’s primary in hopes of returning to Washington in the 2026 elections.

If chosen by his party for the race, his mission would be to unseat Republican John Cornyn, who has been in the Senate since 2002. Allred is the second candidate to officially announce his bid, and during these summer days marked by catastrophic floods that have left the state in mourning, he’s touring Texas — from Dallas to Houston, through San Antonio and Austin, all the way to the border cities of McAllen and Brownsville. It’s the start of a campaign with which, for the second time, he aims to break the decades-long Republican stronghold on Texas’ Senate seats in the capital.

The former NFL player and civil rights attorney is a well-known figure in Texas. Although he lost to Ted Cruz, who has been a senator in Washington since 2013, in the 2024 elections, Allred received 5.5 percentage points more votes than Kamala Harris did in the presidential race, which strengthens his profile. Preliminary polls also suggest that a bruising Republican primary between current Senator Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton could leave Allred particularly well positioned heading into the November 2026 midterms, where Democrats aim to claw back the Republicans’ razor-thin majority.

Allred speaks with EL PAÍS after an event at a packed community center in Houston, where attendees gathered to hear the imposing candidate in a blue shirt speak. “I want to tell you that I’m running again for one reason: because I don’t give up — and I know you don’t either,” he says to the applause of a crowd already beginning to gear up for the next election cycle.

Question: Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office in 30 years. What’s your platform doing differently to change that pattern? How do you plan to stand out in a competitive primary?

Answer. I’m a fourth-generation Texan, so I know our history. And I also know that a lot of people are hungry for change. We need to make sure folks know that it’s not just about telling them, but showing them that we’re on their side. Particularly for the hardworking people who grew up like I did, being raised by a single mother, a public school teacher, knowing what it means to struggle. I want to make sure that everyone in that situation knows that I’m going to be a fighter for them. And that I care about our state. I’m in this to make sure that everyone has a chance to chase their version of the American dream. And I really think that will resonate.

Q. You say that an anti-corruption agenda is a central pillar of your campaign. What does it consist of, and how do you plan to implement it?

A. The problem with corruption is that it’s not just wrong, it costs working people dearly. We see that reflected in the special tax breaks and in this bill [Trump’s mega tax law] they just passed. That ends up costing all of us. And I think it also leads people to be more cynical about our democracy as a whole and to think that everyone is a crook.

That’s why I think we need to have a very specific plan to try to prevent this and reign this back in, but also to get people back to work for what they’re supposed to be doing: serving the people they represent, rather than themselves or their special interests. How are we going to implement that plan? Well, it’s about building public support. I don’t think it’s very hard not to support certain measures to prevent corruption. Once folks see there is another way, that will gain momentum.

Q. What is your proposal to alleviate the cost of living crisis in Texas, especially in housing, health care, and transportation?

A. When I was a kid, I was worried every time we went to the grocery store, wondering if we would have enough to pay for everything that week. I know what folks are going through. In the last election, working people were promised that the focus would be on lowering their costs. Instead, what we’ve seen is just the opposite. This bill that just passed is a big bust. It is going to raise costs for working people, kick people off their health care, all to cut taxes for the rich.

We need to address the affordability crisis from every possible angle. Regarding housing, we need more supply. When it comes to making sure that the dignity of work is respected, we can need to make sure that folks are being paid what they deserve, that they get the benefits of their labor, and hold accountable the price gougers who are trying to keep their costs artificially high.

I’ve always focused a lot on the costs of early childhood and child care, because we’re young parents, but also because I know that for many workers, one of their biggest costs is what they’ll do with their children. We lost a lot of childcare centers during the pandemic. Costs have gone up on the ones that are left. And early childhood care is incredibly expensive and difficult for working families. While it may not seem like it’s part of the affordability crisis, it’s one of the biggest costs folks have.

We have to expand healthcare and lower the cost. Too many people don’t have health insurance, or if they do, they can’t afford it. And that has many indirect costs. Medical debt is still one of our highest sources of bankruptcy. That’s not right. This bill is going to kick 1.7 million Texans off their healthcare. That’s not right.

Q. What is your position on guns?

A. I grew up around guns. I grew up going to camps where we learned how to handle a rifle responsibly. But we’re seeing too much daily violence and mass shootings, and there are important steps we can take. These steps have only been prevented by a corrupt system that is rigged in order to allow a special interest to prevent common-sense measures from passing. That’s part of the root issue: to achieve any of these things, you have to address what’s holding them back.

We often come back to how our campaigns are funded, how the system is broken, and what we can do to restore that structure — that your incentive is to do what’s right for the people you represent, not for special interests. I believe we can respect the Second Amendment while protecting our children.

Q. As the first Black Democratic Senate candidate, and a father, what does it mean to you to represent the diversity of Texas?

A. I’m incredibly proud of how diverse we are as a state. Our diversity is a strength for us. I’m not running to be the first Black senator; I’d just be where I was elected. But I hope kids can see the things I’ve done, from being a civil rights lawyer, to the NFL, to serving in Congress, to potentially being a U.S. senator. Know that I was raised by a single mother, that I come from public schools, and that they can do it too. We have to set up ladders of opportunity, so people can achieve their goals. If we do that, then it’s their responsibility to take advantage of it. But if we don’t provide them with those opportunities, then it’s on us that we have held them back.

Q. Texas is at the center of the immigration debate in the United States. What do you propose to maintain border security without compromising respect for migrants and human rights?

A. Well, my family is from Brownsville, a very typical Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. I spent a lot of my childhood there. And I think we needed to do more to secure the border. We must have a secure border, but do it in a way that is consistent with our values, treating people the right way. Those values also mean that when we don’t do that, we lose something fundamental. How we treat others says more about us than it does about them.

We have a broken immigration system, and we need comprehensive reform that includes border security. The goal is also to bring folks out of the shadows and provide a path to citizenship for those who have been here for a while, followed the rules, and haven’t broken the law. We need to provide resources to a system so broken that it doesn’t have enough immigration judges. It doesn’t have the capacity to process people in a timely manner so we can maintain our asylum system, which also reflects our values.

Q. Regarding the recent floods in Texas, what do you propose to ensure that the response to these disasters does not repeat the same weaknesses that have become evident now?

A. What I’ve seen from spending six years on the House Infrastructure Committee is that when it comes to emergency, disaster, and extreme weather prevention, you need to have overlapping systems of notification. You have to have sirens, signs, cell phone notifications—everything possible to quickly provide information at a critical time. It does seem that there was some breakdown along that chain. It’s also true that we had key staffing positions that were not filled. Sometimes I think some of these positions are extra until a crisis hits, and then you need them.

There are mitigation steps that can be taken to ensure that, if it’s an area that floods, we can try to make it safer. But I think the first requirement is to understand that we’re going to continually face more extreme weather events. We will have floods and hurricanes much more regularly. So we have to be prepared to protect both people and property. For me, that has to start with understanding and accepting the science behind it.

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He was on the verge of becoming the third Spanish Nobel Prize winner in science, after Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Severo Ochoa. But the Madrid-born biochemist Pedro Cuatrecasas died of cancer on March 19 at the age of 88 in La Jolla, California, and no obituary was published in any news outlet — not in his beloved homeland and not in his adopted country. Hardly anyone knows of Cuatrecasas’ existence, yet it would be hard to pick a person at random who hasn’t somehow benefited from his tremendous body of work. The researcher participated in the development of some 40 drugs, some of them well-known, such as acyclovir for herpes; sumatriptan for migraines; and atorvastatin, a cholesterol-lowering molecule that became the best-selling drug in history.

Cuatrecasas was born in Madrid on September 27, 1936, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, as the fascists were advancing toward the capital. His father, a sympathizer of the Republican Left, was one of Spain’s most renowned scientists: José Cuatrecasas, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens until the coup’s victory forced him to flee with his family to the Americas. The boy grew up in exile in Colombia until his father found work in the United States in 1947. There, Pedro Cuatrecasas studied medicine and it soon became clear that he was Nobel Prize material.

“Pedro was absolutely brilliant,” recalls U.S. physician Peter Agre, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2003 for discovering the pores that allow water molecules to pass through cells, giving rise to sweat and tears. Agre, 12 years his junior, joined Cuatrecasas’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1973. He found a charismatic scientist, “gifted with enormous intelligence” and “extremely competitive.”

In 1968, at just 32 years old, Cuatrecasas and another colleague revolutionized biology and medicine with an eight-page study in which they invented a new technique for capturing specific molecules in a mixture of substances: affinity chromatography. The tool made it possible to easily purify hormones, antibodies, proteins and DNA. “There were rumors in the lab that Pedro could be the next Nobel Prize winner. If he had received it, he would have been hailed in Spain as a national hero, like Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Severo Ochoa,” says Agre.

Cuatrecasas had previously trained at the National Institutes of Health in the United States, under Christian Anfinsen, who also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972 after demonstrating that the sequence of a protein’s components determines its three-dimensional structure and function. In Anfinsen’s laboratory, the Spanish son of Civil War exiles met the Polish scientist Meir Wilchek, a Jew who fled the Nazis after his father was murdered at the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The two former refugees, then in their thirties, conceived the revolutionary affinity chromatography together, but added their boss as a third co-author out of courtesy.

“Pedro was very honest; he insisted on having Anfinsen sign the study,” recalls Wilchek, who is about to turn 90. “When we published it, it revolutionized the world of biology, biochemistry, and many other fields, because what had required months or years of work could now be done in a few hours. The method remains the most useful for purifying the molecules of living beings,” the researcher emphasized via email, just days after Iran bombed the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, where he has spent half his life.

In 1987, Wilchek and Cuatrecasas won the Wolf Prize, considered a precursor to the Nobel Prize. The award statement applauded their invention with a resounding statement: “Few if any other new techniques have so markedly and rapidly affected the growth of biomedical sciences.” The award highlighted that the tool could also be used to diagnose diseases and develop treatments. Cuatrecasas himself had used it to purify crucial molecules, such as the cellular receptors for insulin and estrogen, implicated in diabetes and breast cancer, respectively.

“We were nominated many times for the Nobel Prize,” Wilchek recalls. “Peter was a modest person. He didn’t give himself enough publicity, just like me, and that may be one of the reasons why we didn’t win the Nobel,” says the Polish scientist, who is still eligible for the award. The Swedish prize, however, is not awarded posthumously. “One day I met a member of the Nobel committee, and he told me we would never win it because Anfinsen was one of the signatories of our study and he had already received the prize for other research,” says Wilchek.

Cuatrecasas considered himself both Spanish and American until his death, his son Paul explains over the phone. “My grandparents always had typical Spanish food at their house in Washington: chorizo, anchovies… And my father returned to Spain once a year,” he recalls. On those trips, Pedro would visit his brother Gil, an abstract expressionist painter who decided to leave Washington, where he was an acclaimed artist, to move to Barcelona and disappear from public life. When Gil died of prostate cancer in 2004, Pedro found 400 of the artist’s monumental canvases that had been kept in storage for decades.

On June 19, exactly three months after Pedro Cuatrecasas’s death, the Spanish scientist Ignacio Vicente Sandoval wrote to EL PAÍS to suggest publishing a story about the deceased researcher, given the widespread silence in the national and international media. Sandoval worked with him for five years half a century ago, first at Johns Hopkins and then at Burroughs Wellcome Laboratories, after Cuatrecasas switched to the pharmaceutical industry in 1975.

“Pedro always kept his Spanish side very much alive; he never renounced his nationality,” recalls his colleague, who recently retired at 75 from the Spanish National Research Council. “He distanced himself from the Nobel Prize when he went to work for Wellcome, but Pedro was very aware that he wanted to focus on developing medicines that could truly be useful to humanity,” says Sandoval.

In 2013, Cuatrecasas published a book about his painter brother that included a brief biography of himself. The text highlighted that he had been “involved in the discovery of more than 40 new drugs,” such as the antidepressant bupropion, the antiepileptic gabapentin, the anti-lice treatment RID, and zidovudine, the first antiretroviral drug used against the AIDS virus. In addition to being director of Burroughs Wellcome Laboratories between 1975 and 1985, he was vice president of R&D at Glaxo between 1986 and 1989 and president of Parke-Davis (later acquired by Pfizer) between 1989 and 1997. He was “a giant of pharmacology,” according to the obituary published by the National Institutes of Health.

Sandoval emphasizes the key to Cuatrecasas’s success: he surrounded himself with the best and gave them the freedom to follow their curiosity. The Madrid-born biochemist warned of the end of an era in 2006 in an article titled Drug Discovery in Jeopardy. Cuatrecasas, at 70, criticized the “mega-mergers” of pharmaceutical companies, the voracity of investment banks, the obsession for blockbuster drugs, and the shift of control of research from scientists to marketers. The executives of most of these companies, he said, didn’t understand the complexities of science, its methods or its objectives, and they ran their organizations in ways that stifled creativity and innovation. Before 1980, he believed, things were different. Companies were smaller and not yet controlled by CEOs from business schools. Previously, Cuatrecasas said, employees felt they were contributing to improving the health of humanity.

Curiosity led the Madrid native to discover, around 1969, that the hormone insulin exerts its effect by reversibly binding to the surface of cells, a finding that “arguably launched the modern field of endocrinology,” according to the National Institutes of Health obituary. Sandoval argues that “giving him the Nobel Prize would have been richly deserved, both for affinity chromatography and for the insulin receptor.”

At just 33 years old, his prestige was colossal. Biochemist Vann Bennett, a professor emeritus at Duke University, recalls that he went to work at Cuatrecasas’s “vibrant laboratory” in 1971 because it was recommended to him by the geneticist Daniel Nathans, who would also win the Nobel Prize in Medicine seven years later.

Endocrinologist Alan Saltiel, a disciple of Cuatrecasas, emphasizes that the latter successively led, for almost a quarter of a century, the research of three of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, which led to the development of 40 new drugs, including the cholesterol-lowering drug atorvastatin, which generated some $130 billion until its patent expired.

“It’s impossible to overstate the impact he had on these three companies, not only by establishing the teams that achieved these discoveries, but, even more importantly, by creating a culture of science-based discovery, in which biologists, chemists, clinicians, regulatory experts, and other colleagues could freely explore their intuitions,” applauds Saltiel, director of the Institute for Diabetes and Metabolic Health at the University of California, San Diego. “I think his track record of success proved him right. Unfortunately, this type of culture is rare in the industry today.”

In the digital newspaper archive of the National Library of Spain, there are barely half a dozen mentions of Pedro Cuatrecasas in the Spanish press over the last six decades. EL PAÍS interviewed him in 1987, almost two decades after he revolutionized biomedicine, but he remained unknown even among his colleagues, who used his technique without knowing who had invented it. “Perhaps not everyone knows that I was working to develop the affinity chromatograph,” he declared in Spanish with a strong American accent. “Now it’s no longer necessary to mention me, because everyone knows what it means, but I don’t mind; it gives me great satisfaction. It means that it’s such a recognized and assimilated technique that it’s already part of our working tools.”

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