The 53rd Daytime Emmy Awards brought daytime television’s unusually broad tent under one roof at the Palladium in Hollywood: serial dramas, talk, culinary television, travel, home-improvement series, entertainment news, courtroom shows and digital-first programming all appeared on the ballot. Among the confirmed winners, the clearest headline belongs to Roger Howarth, who won outstanding supporting performance in a daytime drama series for playing Matt Clark on The Young and the Restless.
The victory is historic because Howarth’s previous Daytime Emmy win came 32 years ago, the longest interval between wins in the awards’ history. That is a remarkable reminder of what daytime drama performance can demand: characters, casts and audiences can persist across decades, while an actor’s next award-recognized chapter may arrive long after the first.
The ceremony covered programming eligible between January 1 and December 31, 2025. It was held as one mid-fall event and streamed on YouTube, with Matthew Hoffman serving as announcer rather than a traditional host.
Roger Howarth’s record is the night’s defining drama story
Howarth’s win arrived in a supporting-actor field that included Sean Dominic and Michael Graziadei from The Young and the Restless, Timon Kyle Durrett and Mike Manning from Beyond the Gates, and Lawrence Saint-Victor from The Bold and the Beautiful. The category matters because a supporting performance often carries the difficult job of making a long-running ensemble feel connected, even when the episode’s central plot belongs elsewhere.
In awards language, a supporting performance is not a lesser kind of acting. It identifies work positioned outside the series’ lead-actor categories. For an ongoing daytime drama, those performers can be vital to the pace and continuity of storylines that unfold episode by episode rather than in a short, self-contained season.
The Young and the Restless came into the ceremony with 18 nominations, the highest total among programs listed. Its other confirmed acting win went to Beth Maitland, honored as outstanding supporting actress for playing Traci Abbott. The show also earned nominations across production disciplines, including costume design/styling, sound, art direction/set decoration/scenic design, casting, directing and drama writing.
That breadth is useful context for the two acting wins. The Daytime Emmys do not only reward the face of a series; they also recognize the teams shaping how an episode looks, sounds, moves and gets made. A nomination spread across crafts is evidence of a show competing on multiple fronts, even when the supplied results do not identify winners in every one of those categories.
A field that spans new soaps and established institutions
Beyond the Gates, a new CBS soap opera in its first year of eligibility, followed closely with 15 nominations. It received recognition in the drama-series, writing, casting and technical categories, while performers Karla Mosley, Tamara Tunie, Trisha Mann-Grant, Timon Kyle Durrett, Mike Manning, Jasmine Burke, Ambyr Michelle and Arielle Prepetit were among its acting nominees.
Related coverage includes Daytime Emmys 2026: Roger Howarth Makes History as Winners Emerge.
Two confirmed craft wins underline the show’s early awards presence. Beyond the Gates shared the outstanding hairstyling and makeup award for Episode 103, tying with The Kelly Clarkson Show Episode 5033. A tie means the honor was awarded jointly, rather than requiring one entry to outrank the other. In categories driven by distinct kinds of programming, this result also demonstrates the Daytime Emmys’ range: a serial drama and a studio talk show can each receive recognition for the specialized visual work that supports their format.
The drama landscape also included nominees from Days of Our Lives, General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful. Jeff Kober won outstanding guest performance in a daytime drama for his role as Cyrus Renault on General Hospital. The guest-performance category recognizes a performer appearing in a more limited capacity than a regular member of a show’s principal cast.
Elsewhere in the drama acting races, Heather Tom was nominated for lead actress for The Bold and the Beautiful. The nomination put her in position to potentially claim a seventh Daytime Emmy and move beyond Erika Slezak’s six-win mark for the most wins by an actress in daytime history. The results provided here do not identify the lead-acting winners, so that potential record should not be treated as a completed one.
Travel, food and short-form winners show the category range
Outside the soaps, Lucky Chow won outstanding culinary cultural series. Its recognition distinguishes it from the separate culinary instructional category, a meaningful distinction in awards terms. “Instructional” programming is centered on teaching viewers how to do something; “cultural” programming can use food as a route into people, places and traditions. Danielle Chang, the host of Lucky Chow, was also nominated for outstanding culinary host.
Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross won outstanding travel and adventure program. The category’s nominees ranged across Discovery Channel, Apple, National Geographic, Pets.TV and Roku, illustrating how daytime-recognized programming now reaches audiences through a mix of linear channels and streaming platforms.
KeyTV Network’s Glam Through The Ages won outstanding daytime short-form program, while Keke Palmer received a nomination in the non-daily daytime-personality category for the same project. Short-form recognizes a format built for briefer installments than conventional television episodes. Its presence beside network and streaming productions is one of the more tangible signs of how the daytime field is defined by type of programming rather than a single distribution model.
Giada De Laurentiis won outstanding daytime personality, non-daily, for Giada in My Kitchen. The “non-daily” qualifier separates programs and personalities that do not operate on a daily broadcast schedule from the daily categories represented by entertainment-news and courtroom personalities.
Craft awards put the production teams in focus
The confirmed winners also spotlighted disciplines audiences may notice without always naming. Long Way Home, specifically the episode “Lost in Lapland,” won both outstanding cinematography or camerawork and outstanding sound mixing and sound editing for a prerecorded daytime program. Cinematography or camerawork concerns the capture and composition of images; sound mixing and editing involves shaping the audible experience, including the balance and construction of recorded sound.
A Different Breed won outstanding editing for a daytime non-studio program for “The Season Begins.” Editing is the process of arranging images and sound into a coherent final program, affecting rhythm, clarity and the flow of information. In a non-studio format, that work may have to organize material shot across changing environments rather than on a fixed set.
For studio programming, “Craft Roundtables: Editors” won outstanding editing. The Kelly Clarkson Show won live-program sound mixing and sound editing for Episode 5007, and its Episode 5033 shared the hairstyling and makeup honor. Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade won outstanding technical direction and video, a category that concerns the complex real-time coordination of cameras and video elements in a live presentation.
The Young and the Restless received the costume design/styling award for Episode 13273. Costume and styling work is more than clothing selection: within serial drama, it helps establish character, status, tone and continuity from scene to scene.
Honors beyond competitive categories
Genie Francis, a defining figure associated with General Hospital, was named this year’s Lifetime Achievement honoree. The ceremony also recognized Byron Allen, Meredith Vieira, Patrika Darbo and Francesca James as Gold Circle inductees. Stephen Brown and Rubin Ervin were named Silver Circle inductees.
These honors sit apart from the episode- and program-specific competitive awards. They recognize careers and sustained contribution rather than a single eligible performance or production.
One other result provides a useful snapshot of the ceremony’s wide remit: Off Script With The Hollywood Reporter won outstanding arts and popular culture program. The field also included two differently distributed editions of Actors on Actors, one carried by PBS SoCal in spring 2025 and another on CNN’s streaming platform in fall 2025. That split eligibility reflects a daytime awards landscape in which a program’s platform can change while its format remains recognizable.
For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple: the Daytime Emmys are not a soap-only awards show, though the drama races remain central to its identity. The 2026 winners so far spotlight a veteran actor making history, a leading drama with wins across performance and craft, and a programming slate extending from food culture to travel, live events and short-form video. For more on the broader production business around film and television, see our coverage of the push for a federal film and TV production tax credit.
