As one awards season ends, another begins. Over the past few weeks, Hollywood has been subtly (okay, maybe blatantly) shifting its post-Oscars posture to gear up for a long, competitive Emmys season. FYC events are already underway. The big contenders are rolling out. And tremendous uncertainty remains: Without a Succession or fresh juggernaut like Shōgun in the mix, past nominees like Severance, The White Lotus, and The Last of Us are primed to duke it out for the best-drama prize. No limited series from the fall could overtake Baby Reindeer with the end-of-year guild awards, leaving an opening for some unconventional contenders—see HBO’s prestige comic adaptation The Penguin, or FX’s upcoming dark comedy Dying for Sex—in a relatively thin year for the field. And after its shocking, delightful upset win for best comedy last year, Hacks comes into this Emmys cycle as the top dog at least. Which can be a precarious place to be.

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

But enough of this stuff, which any Emmy watcher knows well. On this week’s Little Gold Men (listen below), my cohost Rebecca Ford and Vanity Fair staff writer Chris Murphy joined me to select six new series currently available for streaming, eligible for—and deserving of—Emmy nominations this summer. There’s plenty more to come, of course—on this week’s episode, we also discuss the hype around Apple TV+’s upcoming industry satire The Studio. But consider this a guide to get you in the Emmys mood and remind you that, even in a very weird time for Hollywood and for streaming, this season has already yielded some gems. If you’re an Academy voter reading this, even better: Here’s where to get started.

The newest show on our list, and also—fair warning—the most harrowing, Adolescence (now streaming on Netflix) takes four brutal hours of your time and delivers an unforgettably haunting experience. Cocreated by and starring the great character actor Stephen Graham, the show imagines the immediate fallout of a 13-year-old boy being arrested on suspicion of murdering a classmate. Each episode unfolds in a single shot, offering the series an astounding level of visual depth and narrative precision. The first hour explores the actual arrest and subsequent interrogation; the second shifts focus to the chaotic public school the boy attended. From there, things get more disturbing—and compelling.

That goes especially for the performances, from Graham’s devastating work as the boy’s father to the remarkable new actor behind the boy himself, Owen Cooper. “Cooper…must play a raw nerve careening between charm, vulnerability, and anger—in his first acting credit no less,” Tracy Moore recently wrote for Vanity Fair. “He does it so adeptly in episode three that it evokes Edward Norton’s career-making moment in Primal Fear.”

This biting rom-com streamed on Peacock in December to very little fanfare—a case of a binge-release drop not catching on with viewers. That’s unfortunate, especially given how smartly the show executes a grabby premise—a single woman (played by Stephanie Hsu) realizes her exes are dying in the order she slept with them—and how effectively its many moving parts come together. Oscar-nominated a few years ago for Everything Everywhere All at Once, Hsu is a force in the lead role and is reason alone for Laid to jump to the top of anyone’s catch-up lists. “You couldn’t do the story that we’re doing, I think, with anybody else, because she brings a sense of reality to everything she does,” co-showrunner Nahnatchka Khan told Vanity Fair of her star last fall. “She makes it feel lived-in and funny and vulnerable.”

Max’s riveting, deeply empathetic medical drama has felt like a throwback in more ways than one. Starring a superb Noah Wyle as the attending emergency physician of a Pittsburgh hospital, the show plays like ER meets 24 (every episode covers one hour of his 15-hour shift), melding satisfying procedural storytelling with suspenseful serialized arcs. But the show is also being organically discovered in a fashion much rarer in the age of streaming. With a meaty 15-episode order and a weekly air schedule, viewers are gradually still finding the show, and falling hard for it.

The series was created by R. Scott Gemmill, whose work on ER netted him two Emmy nominations for best drama more than two decades ago. Wyle is also a beloved alum of that groundbreaking show, with five acting Emmy nominations under his belt. The Pitt ought to bring both of them back into the awards fold. Beyond that, the main challenge for the campaign will be sifting through an enormous supporting cast—standouts include Tracy Ifeachor, Katherine LaNasa, and Taylor Dearden—to figure out who’s got the best chance at recognition.

Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw in a stylish, sexy spy show? The sell for Black Doves isn’t especially hard. But still: Joe Barton’s lean and mean espionage thriller fully delivers on its goods. The Netflix show follows Knightley’s undercover spy as her identity is seemingly compromised, and Whishaw as the estranged friend who comes back into her life to help her out. Their buddy chemistry is off the charts, with each performance equally appealing. In his December review, Little Gold Men’s Richard Lawson wrote, “Their rapport is textured and credible, the result of thoughtful, specific writing and performances.”

Knightley has received the lion’s share of awards love so far, with Golden Globe and Critics Choice nominations. Whishaw, a past Emmy winner for A Very English Scandal, will hopefully join in that embrace come Emmy time, in addition to the savvy writing and stylish filmmaking.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s best-selling nonfiction book of the same name was acquired for adaptation years ago, but based on the results of FX’s riveting limited series, the wait was clearly worth it. The decades-spanning portrait of IRA member Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake across different timelines) operates as both an intimate, complex character study and an expansive exploration of the Troubles in Northern Ireland—from the harrowing on-the-ground reality to the mournful reflection that followed. It’s also an immersive foray into the thrills of collective resistance, the perilous blurring between activism and radicalism, and the long tail of regret.

Created by Joshua Zetumer, the show (streaming on Hulu) received a few writing nominations during the winter guild awards season, but was otherwise ignored by industry voting bodies. But this historical drama is a significant achievement, so let’s hope the Academy has it on their watch lists. Say Nothing needs to be seen to be believed.

If there’s a show on this list you’ve probably already seen, it’s this one. So we won’t say too much more, except that if you haven’t, the Netflix smash rom-com goes down as smooth as anything in contention this year, with charming performances and snappy writing across the board. And hey—any vehicle likely to deliver extremely overdue first Emmy nominations to Kristen Bell and Adam Brody is one that deserves our full support.