HBO (again unsurprisingly) was the biggest winner at this year’s Emmys, taking home 30 awards to Netflix’s 21. Content currently available on Showmax took home a whopping 34 awards, including Best Limited Series (Watchmen), Best Drama (Succession), Best TV Movie (Bad Education), Best Animation (Rick & Morty) and Best Children’s Program (We Are The Dream: The Kids of the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest), with more to come soon. Winners on Showmax include:

WATCHMEN

HBO’s Watchmen was the biggest winner overall at the 2020 Emmys, with 11 wins from its 26 nominations, including Outstanding Limited Series, Lead Actress (Regina King as Sister Night), and Supporting Actor (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Cal Abar, beating out castmates Jovan Adepo as Hooded Justice and Louis Gossett Jr. as William Reeves), not to mention Writing, Casting, Cinematography, Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes, Picture Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Original Dramatic Score.  

SUCCESSION S2 – FIRST ON SHOWMAX

HBO’s Succession was the biggest winner in the Drama category at the 2020 Emmys, taking home seven awards, including Outstanding Drama Series, Lead Actor (Jeremy Strong as Kendall, beating off 2020 Golden Globe winner Brian Cox as his father Logan), Guest Actress (Cherry Jones as Nan Pierce – her second win in the category in two years), Directing, Writing, Casting, and Picture Editing.

BAD EDUCATION – FIRST ON SHOWMAX

HBO’s Bad Education was named Outstanding TV Movie at the 2020 Emmys, beating off the likes of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs The Reverend.

Based on true story, Bad Education follows Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman, who was up for Best Actor for the role) and Pam Gluckin (Oscar winner Allison Janney), whose reign over a prestigious school district is threatened by the single largest public school embezzlement scheme in America’s history, which was uncovered by a student journalist.

RICK AND MORTY S4 – FIRST ON SHOWMAX

At the 2020 Emmys, Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty was named Best Animated Program for The Vat of Acid Episode, beating off the final season of BoJack Horseman, as well as Big Mouth, Bob’s Burgers, and The Simpsons. This is Rick & Morty‘s second Best Animated Program Emmy.

WE ARE THE DREAM: THE KIDS OF THE OAKLAND MLK FEST  

At the 2020 Emmys, HBO’s We Are The Dream: The Kids Of The Oakland MLK Fest was the joint winner of Outstanding Children’s Program with Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, beating the likes of Star Wars Resistance.

Executive produced by Oscar winner Mahershali Ali (Moonlight, Ramy), the 58-minute documentary follows the 40^th annual Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest, a public speaking competition where children perform poetry and speeches inspired by the legacy of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the American Civil Rights Movement. 

BlackGirlNerds praised it as “adorable yet inspirational.”

EUPHORIA S1 – FIRST ON SHOWMAX

In HBO’s Euphoria, 24-year-old Zendaya made history at the 2020 Emmys as the youngest Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama winner ever as 17-year-old Rue, who returns home from rehab with no plans to stay clean, and falls for the new girl in town, Jules (played by trans superstar Hunter Schafer). 

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE S1 

Three-time Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo (Spotlight, Avengers) won his first acting Emmy: Best Actor in a Limited Series for his dual role in HBO’s I Know This Much is True, beating off the likes of Hugh Jackman in Bad Education and Jeremy Irons in Watchmen.

Based on the Wally Lamb bestseller about how you don’t just give up on the people you love, I Know this Much is True follows the parallel lives of identical twin brothers Dominick Birdsey and his brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic – both played by Mark, who lost 20 pounds to play Dominic, then gained that back and put another 20 pounds on to play Thomas.

PRIMAL S1 – FIRST ON SHOWMAX

Adult Swim’s Primal won three Outstanding Achievement In Animation Awards at the 2020 Emmys, for storyboard artist Genndy Tartakovsky, art director Scott Wills, and character designer Stephen DeStefano. 

THE HANDMAID’S TALE S3

Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale won Best Production Design from its 10 Emmy nominations this year, beating out Big Little Lies, Killing Eve, The Morning Show, Ozark and Succession.

Season 1 was based on Margaret Atwood’s classic novel of the same name, which won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award for its depiction of Gilead, a totalitarian society in what was formerly the United States, which has returned to ‘traditional values,’ with women treated as property of the state.

INSECURE S4

HBO’s Insecure had its best ever year at the Emmys, with its first win, for Picture Editing, from eight nominations, including Issa Rae’s second Best Actress nomination as Issa and first-time nods for Best Comedy and Best Supporting Actress for Nigerian comedian Yvonne Orji as Molly. 

VIKINGS S6 – FIRST ON SHOWMAX

Thirteen was a lucky number for Vikings, as HISTORY’s breakout hit show won its first Emmy after 13 nominations. Viking‘s final season won Special Visual Effects In A Supporting Role for episode 10, The Best Laid Plans.

GODFATHER OF HARLEM S1

Epix’s Godfather of Harlem won Outstanding Main Title Design, beating out the likes of Abstract: The Art of Design, The Morning Show, Watchmen, and Westworld.

WHY WE HATE

Laura Karpman won Original Dramatic Score for a Documentary Series or Special for Why We Hate,a six-part Discovery series that sets out to answer the question, “Where does hate come from?”

Executive produced by Oscar winners Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) and Alex Gibney (Taxi To The Dark Side, The Inventor: Out for Blood In Silicon Valley), Why We Hate has a 100% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Time calls it “a vital show.” Forbes praises it as a “timely series.” And The Wall Street Journal hails it as “startling, and humbling, especially in its representation of human nature as a force almost beyond human control.” 

It doesn’t end there, another 2020 Emmy winner on Showmax is Mr. Robot, which won Outstanding Interactive Extension of a Linear Program for Season_4.0 ARG. The Masked Singer, which won Costumes: Variety, Non-Fiction or Reality, comes to Showmax on 1 October 2020, while Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, which won Choreography, is coming to Showmax in early 2021.  

WATCHMEN

Watchmen was the #1 show of the year for Empire, Mashable, Screencrush, Vulture, Vox, and Washington Post, where Hank Stuever said the show “continues to take my breath away with its bracing vision of racism, mask-wearing vigilantism and superheroic qualms in a skewed-reality America.”

SUCCESSION

Succession topped numerous favourite lists from AV Club to The Guardian to Uproxx. As The Guardian said: “2019 was the year HBO threw millions upon millions of dollars at the final season of Game of Thrones, only to have another of its shows blow it out of the water entirely.

CHERNOBYL

Chernobyl took the top spot on Radio Times’ critics poll, with reviewer Tim Glanfield calling the mini-series, “a gripping and at times hard to watch drama… an outstanding piece of television… it’s more than a worthy winner of our 2019 critics’ poll.”

BARRY

Barry was the top pick of the year for three separate AV Club critics: Baraka Kaseko, Erik Adams, and Sam Barsanti. This pitch-black comedy stars Bill Hader as Barry, a depressed war-vet-turned-hitman who takes up acting while on assignment in LA.

PEN15

AV Club reviewer Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya chose Pen15 as her top pick of 2019. The comedy series follows 13-year-old besties Maya and Anna [played by 32-year-old co-creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle) as they navigate – and try to survive – seventh grade and puberty. AV Club called it “one of 2019’s most delightful surprises … a hilariously insightful and refreshingly heartfelt look at adolescence in the early 2000s.”

EUPHORIA

Nicky Idika of Pop Buzz picked Euphoria as her favourite show of the year, praising the performances of its lead stars as “phenomenal” and saying, “The show’s cultural impact is already apparent. Euphoria deliberately avoids a sanitised view of modern teen life and, instead, eagerly leans into the drugs, the sex, the risky behaviour, and the toxic co-dependencies.”

RAMY

Ramy stars 2020 Golden Globe winner and stand-up comedian Ramy Youssef as Ramy Hassan, a first generation Egyptian-American in politically-divided New Jersey, where he’s caught between a Muslim community that thinks life is a moral test and a millennial generation that thinks life has no consequences.

THE GOOD FIGHT

Entertainment Weekly’s Darren Franich has been telling everyone he knows to watch his favourite show of last year, The Good Fight, a “smartly hilarious legal drama” whose creators, he says, “are having too much fun throwing axes at the American apocalypse.”

PERPETUAL GRACE

Perpetual Grace was the year’s favourite show for Entertainment Weekly’s Kristen Baldwin, who called it a “strange and wonderful saga” with “a story that unfolds like a Rube Goldberg contraption” and an ensemble cast “stuffed with excellence”.

THE DEUCE

The third and final season of The Deuce got the top vote from AV Club’s Vikram Murthi. Oscar nominee Gyllenhaal plays Candy, a porn director struggling to maintain her artistic integrity in an industry that is quickly devolving. As AV Club reviewer Noel Murray put it, “She shouldn’t just win a trophy, she should have one named after her.”

SURVIVING R. KELLY

Alicia Rancilio of Associated Press picked documentary series Surviving R. Kelly as the top show of the year, saying, “No other series made the kind of real world impact that this one did.”

And in case you hadn’t figured it out yet, all the above is available for your viewing on Showmax, which also has the Michael Jackson documentary Leaving Neverland, Spanish/English horror comedy series Los Espookys, anti-war comedy-drama Catch-22, and Season 4 of Adult Swim animated comedy Rick & Morty, among other hit shows from 2019 (a year full of great TV shows evidently). See the full breakdown from Metacritic here.

WATCHMEN S1
New episodes every Monday

Inspired by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ iconic DC graphic novel, Watchmen is set in an alternate history where masked vigilantes are treated as outlaws. Oscar, Golden Globe and Emmy winner Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk, Seven Seconds) leads a strong cast as Angela Abar, alongside the likes of Oscar winners Jeremy Irons and Louis Gossett Junior, Golden Globe winner Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson (Oh Brother Where Art Thou), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Aquaman) and Adelaide Clemens (The Great Gatsby). The series is created by Emmy winner Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers), with Andrij Parekh (Succession), Nicole Kassell (The Following), Emmy nominee Stephen Williams (Westworld) and Oscar nominee Steph Green (The Americans) among the directors.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE S1
Same time as M-Net. New episodes every Friday

The godfather of sci-fi series, the original The Twilight Zone premiered 60 years ago on CBS. The series became a worldwide phenomenon as it used socially conscious storytelling to explore humanity’s hopes, despairs, prides and prejudices in metaphoric ways conventional dramas could not. Oscar winner Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) reboots the series as co-creator and narrator, alongside an all-star cast that includes Oscar nominees Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick) – in an Emmy-nominated performance – and Greg Kinnear (As Good As It Gets); six-time People’s Choice nominee Ginnifer Goodwin (Once Upon A Time); Emmy nominee Tracy Morgan (30 Rock); two-time Critics Choice nominee Adam Scott (Big Little Lies); and Teen Choice nominee John Cho (Star Trek).

GODFATHER OF HARLEM S1
Same time as 1Magic. New episodes every Tuesday

In the early 1960s, infamous crime boss Bumpy Johnson (Oscar winner Forest Whitaker) returns from 10 years in prison to find the neighbourhood he once ruled in a shambles. With the streets controlled by Vincent ‘Chin’ Gigante (Emmy nominee Vincent D’Onofrio from Daredevil and Jurassic World) and the Italian mob, Bumpy must take on the Genovese crime family to regain control. During the brutal battle, he forms an alliance with radical preacher Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch from Selma). Godfather of Harlem shows how the criminal underworld and the civil rights movement collided during one of the most tumultuous times in American history.

PERPETUAL GRACE, LTD S1
First on Showmax. Binge now

This 10-episode modern noir drama follows a young grifter, James (Emmy nominee Jimmi Simpson from Westworld, Black Mirror and House of Cards), as he attempts to prey upon Pastor Byron Brown (Oscar winner Sir Ben Kingsley). But the pastor and his wife Lillian (Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver from Silver Linings Playbook) – known to their parishioners as Pa and Ma – turn out to be far more dangerous than he suspects…

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS S1
First on Showmax. Binge now

From Jemaine Clement (Flight Of The Conchords) and Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok), the hit mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows is a look into the daily (or rather, nightly) lives of three vampires who’ve lived together in New York for over 100 years – plenty of time to get on each other’s nerves.

HIS DARK MATERIALS S1
First On Showmax. New episodes every Tuesday, express from the US, from 5 November

Lyra’s search for a kidnapped friend uncovers a sinister plot involving stolen children, setting off a quest through parallel worlds to understand a mysterious phenomenon called Dust. The fantasy’s cast includes child stars Dafne Keen and Amir Wilson as Lyra and Will, supported by Golden Globe winner Ruth Wilson (The Affair, Luther), Golden Globe nominee James McAvoy (X-Men), and BAFTA winner Helen McCrory (Harry Potter, The Queen). Oscar winner Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) is one of the directors.

Interested in finding out what else they have in store, well then check in here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yKq1PRvPJQ

Not to be confused with Zack Syner’s 2009 film adaptation, Damon Lindelof’s HBO take on The Watchmen universe is inspired by the original graphic novel from Alan Moore. According to The Verge:

“This isn’t a direct adaptation of Moore’s 1986 work, which focuses on vigilantes in an alternate United States operating during the Cold War and is widely regarded as one of the most important comic books of all time. Instead, Lindelof’s take is set within the world Moore created, using central Watchmen character Rorschach as a way to springboard into a new era. Superheroes — or costumed vigilantes — are still around in Lindelof’s tale, and it’s clear they aren’t to be trusted. That helps explain why Lindelof’s design includes references to fictional groups based on modern-day organizations like Anonymous. 

They go on to mention that:

“The teaser trailer showcases the differences between what Lindelof wants to do and what Moore achieved. It references characters like The Comedian and Ozymandias, but not necessarily how die-hard fans of the series remember them.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7vrjkheBt8

A great prospect 2019 is already looking like, we for ones are here for that and more…we especially can’t wait. Let the fun viewing commence!