TV Academy Cancels Televerse for 2027 Emmy Season; Festival Will Return in Early 2028

Televerse is taking a telebreak. The Television Academy’s TV festival, which launched in 2025 and continued this year, won’t be back in 2027 — and will move to earlier in the year when it returns in 2028, the org announced Friday.

That now places Televerse at the start of the Emmy FYC season, as opposed to during the Phase 2 voting period.

“Following insightful feedback from attendees and our industry partners, the Television Academy is excited to announce Televerse will be returning in a new time frame sometime in the first quarter of 2028, allowing a more expansive period to build on the popular festival’s maiden two years,” the org said in a statement. “New dates and details will be announced as they become available. We look forward to continuing to celebrate Television outside the box in early 2028.”

The move also comes as the TV Academy will have its hands full in 2027: Not only is the org’s Emmy telecast moving to a new home (Amazon’s Prime Video), but it will be busy completing a merger with its New York counterpart, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

This year’s Televerse took place from Friday, Aug. 14 to Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026, at the JW Marriott at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles. Televerse was originally pitched as a consumer/industry hybrid event, with reunions and panels directed to TV fans, but also as the first official batch of Emmy Phase 2 campaign events for nominated shows and stars.

This year’s event included panels for shows like “The Diplomat,” “Hacks,” “Shrinking,” “Beef,” “The Pitt,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” “Pluribus,” “All Her Fault” and reunions of shows like “Revenge” and “Homeland.”

The first Televerse attracted more than 2,500 attendees — with approximately 75% consisting of TV Academy members and the other 25% from the general public. The event centered on Phase 2 FYC panels from Emmy-nominated shows, the first time it had thrown sanctioned campaign events after the Emmy nominations. That first year included panels for shows like “The Pitt,” “Severance,” “The Studio,” “Abbott Elementary,” “Slow Horses” and “Top Chef,” among others. Other nominated shows that couldn’t front a panel were still given the option to screen an episode.

The staff behind the ATX TV Festival (led by Emily Gipson and Caitlin McFarland) helped organize reunions and industry-centric discussions.

In a 2025 chat with Variety after the inaugural event, TV Academy president Maury McIntyre said the goal was to eventually make Televerse a profitable, annual staple on the TV calendar. (In the first year, networks/studios were charged $10,000 per hour for the FYC sessions.)

“We wanted to test the waters the first year,” McIntyre said at the time. “It’s really something that makes us feel like we have tapped into something that people really are interested in, and that it bodes well for the future.”