Emmys Highlight a Changing TV Industry

Ursula Coyote/AMC

Bryan Cranston in “Breaking Bad,” which is considered a front-runner for the best drama award.

LOS ANGELES â€" The Emmy Awards have witnessed many new players on the red carpet over the years, but there has never been a gate-crasher quite like Netflix.

Kevin Spacey with Robin Wright in “House of Cards.” Both actors are nominated for Emmys.

Its “House of Cards” is nominated for outstanding drama, the first time that a program distributed on the Internet has competed at the Emmys right alongside programs distributed through rabbit ears and satellite dishes. And the prospect that a streaming video service like Netflix could end up a winner at the Emmys ceremony on Sunday night has cast a spotlight on just how profoundly the television landscape has changed.

Still, most television critics and other self-professed Emmys experts suspect that it’s the cable channel AMC, not Netflix, that will have the most to celebrate at the awards show. “Breaking Bad,” which has been nominated for best drama four times before but has never won, is the clear favorite this year. In an e-mail, Debra Birnbaum, the editor in chief of TV Guide Magazine, borrowed a phrase from the series’ meth lord Walter White: “ ‘Breaking Bad’ is the danger this Emmy season.”

And that’s with just the first half of the show’s final season in contention for an Emmy this year. AMC broke the season into two parts, and only the first half was televised before the May cutoff date for Emmy eligibility. But the second half started to be shown in August, just as Emmy voters were receiving their ballots in the mail. What’s more, the reviews have been uniformly glowing, and the ratings have been building as the Sept. 29 finale approaches. Last Sunday’s episode, which generated more than 16,000 Twitter messages a minute at one point, was the most-watched episode yet, with at least 6.4 million viewers.

So it stands to reason that the Emmy results might reflect all the excitement. (Ballots were due on Aug. 30.) This week the Web site Gold Derby, which tracks Hollywood’s horse races, called “Breaking Bad” the “overwhelming front-runner.”

As it turns out, the series will be competing with the Emmys (televised by CBS) on Sunday night. The three-hour backslapping ceremony will begin at 8 p.m. Eastern, while the 75-minute penultimate episode of “Breaking Bad” will begin at 9 p.m. Since the drama prize is handed out last, “Breaking Bad” viewers can change channels afterward to see if the show won. (And if it doesn’t, well, the second half of the final season will be eligible again in 2014.)

For AMC, an Emmy for “Breaking Bad” would be a welcome acknowledgment of how it, like Netflix, has changed television. Until 2008, the only winners of the top drama Emmy, the most coveted of all, were broadcast networks and HBO. Then “Mad Men” came along and AMC became the first ad-supported cable channel to win the top drama award. “Mad Men” kept winning, for four seasons in a row, until Showtime’s “Homeland” snapped its streak last year.

This time around, both are nominated again, along with “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” PBS’s “Downton Abbey,” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

Netflix won’t say how many people have watched “House of Cards.” HBO’s “Thrones” might be the most popular of the six; HBO said the season finale in June attracted nearly 14 million viewers once on-demand viewership was calculated. About 12 million people saw the season finale of “Downton Abbey”; more than seven million saw “Homeland”; and nearly five million saw “Mad Men.”

For the second year in a row, no dramas from the big four broadcast networks were nominated. But the broadcasters were somewhat better represented in the best comedy category, where ABC’s “Modern Family” is vying for its fourth straight win. It is up against NBC’s “30 Rock,” which ended in May and is eligible for the final time; CBS’s “Big Bang Theory”; HBO’s “Girls” and “Veep”; and FX’s “Louie.”

The one Netflix comedy series that some thought would be nominated, “Arrested Development,” was not. But one of the stars of “Arrested,” Jason Bateman, is up for best lead actor in a comedy. Back on the drama side, Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright are both up for lead actor and actress for “House of Cards.”

Bruce Rosenblum, the chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, said that Netflix’s nominations illustrated the evolving nature of TV.

“This is just the beginning,” he said. “If you look at the quantity of product being developed at Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and Xbox, it’s certainly reasonable to expect that this evolution will accelerate. Having said that, the quality of content on broadcast and cable is certainly at an all-time high as well.”

Netflix’s presence at the Emmys is the result of rules that were amended about six years ago to allow some (but not all) Internet shows. Netflix is technically already a winner: it picked up two awards for casting and cinematography last weekend at the Creative Arts portion of the Emmys. But to put that in context, HBO picked up 20, including eight for its TV movie “Behind the Candelabra.” The recorded Creative Arts ceremony will be shown by FXX on Saturday.

The prime-time ceremony on CBS will take stock of what many observers have called a golden age of TV. There remains a wide gulf, however, between the audience for the Academy Awards, which drew about 40 million viewers this year, and the Emmys, which attracted about 13 million in 2012. The Academy Awards have some advantages: namely, movie stars and 10 brand-new films in competition each year. The Emmys, on the other hand, often celebrate returning shows with relatively small audiences.

But Mr. Rosenblum voiced confidence that the ratings for the Emmys would defy trend lines and grow over time. “The industry is accelerating from a quality standpoint and from a buzz and pop culture standpoint,” he said, “and that at some point will be reflected in our ratings.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Emmys Highlight a Changing TV Industry.