The Marquees Go to Austin

For Immediate Release · Austin, Texas · 2026-05-14

The Marquee Awards — a 21st-century-only honor recognizing television that exists because streaming exists — will be on the ground at the fifteenth ATX TV Festival, tracking the panels that point toward our December ballot.

AUSTIN, TEX. — When Caitlin McFarland and Emily Gipson founded the ATX TV Festival in 2012, the streaming era was a glimmer. Today it is the era, and the festival has become the rare place where streaming-era television writes its own story on stage rather than in a press junket. The Marquee Awards, inaugurating its first ceremony in December 2026, is built to honor exactly that work — so ATX 2026 is, for us, less a junket than a ballot-shaping appointment.

The five W’s

The streaming-era work on the slate

The Marquee Awards is platform-agnostic on principle — we evaluate the work, then note where it ran. Season 15's ATX slate stages a near-complete tour of the streamers we cover. Here is what we will be tracking, mapped to the platforms our December ballot considers.

What the festival's honors tell us

Three of the festival's awards illuminate the kind of work the Marquees were designed to honor: Friday Night Lights (Texas Made Award) for a series whose streaming half-life proves how time works on this medium; Sharon Bialy and Sherry Thomas (Collaborator Award) for the casting work that defined the prestige-streaming canon (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Walking Dead, Barry); and Bill Lawrence (Warren Littlefield Award) for the writers'-room ethos — warmth, decency, ensemble — that Ted Lasso and Shrinking have made into a streaming-era genre of its own.

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