Vince Gilligan Finally Gets A Statue, Marvel Finally Gets An Angel (news roundup).
Your end-of-week genre round-up, 10–11 September 2026: Vince Gilligan breaks a famously long losing streak, Marvel hands out a pair of wings, and Leigh Bardugo prepares to shut the crypt door behind her.
Pluribus ends the Gilligan curse
We noted earlier in the week that the Creative Arts Emmys had been a decent night for genre. What we didn’t have room for then was the detail that matters most: Pluribus took four of them, which finally ends Vince Gilligan’s long and faintly absurd personal drought.
Eighteen nominations this cycle, and the man who gave television Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul had to go and make a science fiction series before the Academy would let him take anything home. There is a thesis in that for somebody, and quite possibly a grudge.
Elsewhere in the technical categories, Fallout took production design and fantasy/sci-fi costumes, Stranger Things won special visual effects for a season, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms collected stunt performance — Westeros continuing to pay its dues in bruises. South Park picked up its fifth animated Emmy and its first since 2013, proving that outliving your critics is itself a strategy.
The main Primetime ceremony goes out on Monday 14 September on NBC and Peacock, with Pluribus against The Pitt in drama and Widow’s Bay against Hacks in comedy. Genre has a genuine shot in both, which is the sort of sentence that would have had you laughed out of a newsroom twenty years ago.
Marvel gets its wings
Thursday’s casting news: Asa Germann has been cast as Angel in Marvel’s X-Men reboot. Germann arrives from Gen V — that is, from the corner of the Boys universe where superheroes are a public health emergency, to the corner of Disney where they are a merchandising opportunity. Quite the cultural adjustment.
He’ll be the third screen Warren Worthington III, and given that the last go-round largely involved standing about looking metallic before being dispatched with minimal ceremony, the bar here is set somewhere around ankle height. Fly over it, lad.
Otherwise the adaptation beat was oddly quiet for two days in September: no greenlights, no rescues, nobody announcing a trilogy they have no intention of finishing. Enjoy it. It won’t survive the awards.
On the shelves
Next Tuesday is the heavy one. Leigh Bardugo’s Dead Beat (Flatiron, 15 September) closes out the Alex Stern trilogy, which began with Ninth House and has spent three volumes making a persuasive case that the real horror of the Ivy League isn’t the secret societies, it’s the alumni network. Bardugo’s own line is that Alex “made it to hell and back more than once, but this time she left the door open behind her” — which, as sequel logic goes, is at least honest about where the plot is coming from.
Sharing the date, Freya Marske’s Bodies of Magic (Tor): five scholars, five secrets, five days to solve a murder and sit the most important exam of their lives. Finals week with a body count. Anyone who has ever revised for anything will recognise the genre immediately.
Also out on the 15th: Helene Wecker’s The Gates of Midnight (Harper), third in the Golem and the Jinni sequence and now up to 1930 New York; L.K. Steven’s Turncloak (Del Rey), second of the Silvercloak books; and Louisa Morgan’s The Faerie Handmaid (Redhook), doing Arthurian business from the servants’ entrance, which is usually where the good material lives. Hannah Mathewson’s The Age of Blood and Magic (William Morrow) rounds out the day with a succession scrap at a magical tech empire following the collapse of its chief executive — a premise which, in 2026, barely qualifies as fantasy.
And if you’re still catching up on last Tuesday, Ken Liu’s collection The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories and Premee Mohamed’s Wickhills both landed on 8 September and both deserve better than your to-be-read pile.
A shelf of Emmy hardware, a winged Marvel casting, and a Monday night ceremony where the robots and the ghosts are actually favourites — and still the most alarming object of the week is a Leigh Bardugo novel with “final” printed on the spine. Tuesday, then. Sleep while you can.
