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Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor - Drama Series
This is a list of the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series winners.
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The X-Files
The X-Files is an American cult science fiction television series and a part of The X-Files franchise, created by screenwriter Chris Carter. It first aired in September 1993 and ended in May 2002. The show was a hit for the Fox network, and its...
Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks is an American television serial drama created by David Lynch and Mark Frost. The series follows the investigation, headed by Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), of the brutal murder of a popular teenager and homecoming queen,...
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is an American television series that was broadcast on NBC from September 22, 1964, to January 15, 1968. It follows the exploits of two secret agents, played by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, who work for a fictitious...
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible is an American television series which was created and initially produced by Bruce Geller. It chronicled the missions of a team of secret American government agents known as the Impossible Missions Force (IMF). The leader of the...
Quantum Leap
Quantum Leap is an American television series that was broadcast on NBC from March 1989 to May 1993. The series was created by Donald P. Bellisario, and starred Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett, a scientist who becomes lost in time following a...
The West Wing
The West Wing is an American television serial drama created by Aaron Sorkin that was originally broadcast from September 22, 1999 to May 14, 2006. The series is set in the West Wing of the White House—where the Oval Office and offices of...
24
24 is an American serial action/drama television series. Broadcast by Fox in the United States and syndicated worldwide, the show first aired on November 6, 2001, with an initial 13 episodes (the next 11 episodes were later ordered). 24 is the...
The Sopranos
The Sopranos is an American television drama series created and produced by David Chase. It premiered on premium cable network HBO in the United States on January 10, 1999 and ended its original run of six seasons and 86 episodes on June 10, 2007....
The Waltons
The Waltons is an American television series created by Earl Hamner, Jr., based on his book Spencer's Mountain, and a 1963 film of the same name, starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara. The show centered on the titular family growing up in a rural...
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
The Six Wives of Henry VIII is a series of six teleplays produced by the BBC and first transmitted between 1 January and 5 February 1970.
The series tells the story of King Henry VIII of England focused on, and often from the perspective of, each of...
In the Heat of the Night
In the Heat of the Night is a television series based on the motion picture and novel of the same name. The series debuted as a midseason replacement for the short-lived NBC series J.J. Starbuck, premiering on March 6, 1988. The series ran on the...
Dallas
Dallas is an American prime-time television soap opera that originally ran from 1978 to 1991. It revolved around the Ewings, a wealthy Texas family in the oil and cattle-ranching industries. The show debuted in April 1978 as a five-part miniseries...
The Dick Van Dyke Show
The Dick Van Dyke Show is an American television sitcom which initially aired on CBS from October 3, 1961 and ran until June 1, 1966. The show was created by Carl Reiner and starred Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. A three-camera/studio audience...
NYPD Blue
NYPD Blue is an American television police drama set in New York City, exploring the internal and external struggles of the fictional 15th precinct of Manhattan.. Each episode typically covers a day and intertwines several plots involving an...
Law & Order
Law & Order is an American police procedural and legal drama television series, which premiered on NBC on September 13, 1990. Created by Dick Wolf, who wrote and produced shows like Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues, the series is set in New York...
Gunsmoke
Gunsmoke is an American radio and television Western drama series created by director Norman MacDonnell and writer John Meston. The stories take place in and around Dodge City, Kansas, during the settlement of the American West.
The radio version...
ER
ER is an American medical drama series created by novelist Michael Crichton that aired on NBC from September 1994 to April 2009. It is set primarily in the emergency room of fictional County General Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. It was produced by...
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (also known as Law & Order: SVU, SVU: Special Victims Unit or simply SVU) is an American police procedural TV series about the Special Victims Unit in a fictional version of the 16th Precinct of the New York City...
Hill Street Blues
Hill Street Blues is a serial police drama that was first aired on NBC in 1981 and ran for 146 episodes on primetime into 1987. Reruns are currently being aired on AmericanLife TV Network on weekday nights in the United States, and on weekday...
Dynasty
Dynasty is an American prime time television soap opera that aired on ABC from January 12, 1981 to May 11, 1989. It was created by Richard and Esther Shapiro and produced by Aaron Spelling, and revolved around the Carringtons, a wealthy oil family...
Chicago Hope
Chicago Hope is an American medical drama series created by David E. Kelley that ran from September 18, 1994 to May 5, 2000. It takes place in a fictional private charity hospital.
The show stars Mandy Patinkin as Dr. Jeffrey Geiger, a hot shot...
Six Feet Under
Six Feet Under is an American television drama series created and produced by Alan Ball. It premiered on the premium cable network HBO in the United States on June 3, 2001 and ended on August 21, 2005, spanning five seasons and 63 episodes. The show...
Ironside
Ironside (originally broadcast under the name A Man Called Ironside in the United Kingdom) is a Universal television series which ran on NBC from September 14, 1967 to February 6, 1975. The character's debut was in a TV-movie on March 28, 1967.
The...
Northern Exposure
Northern Exposure is an American television series that ran on CBS from 1990 to 1995, with a total of 110 episodes. The series was given a pair of consecutive Peabody Awards: in 1991–92 for the show's "depict[ion] in a comedic and often poetic way, ...
Columbo
Columbo is an American crime fiction TV series, starring Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. The show popularized the inverted detective story format; almost every episode began by showing...
Miami Vice
Miami Vice is an American television series produced by Michael Mann for NBC. The show became noted for its heavy integration of music and visual effects to tell a story. The series starred Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas as two Metro-Dade...
Magnum, P.I.
Magnum, P.I. is an American television show starring Tom Selleck as Thomas Magnum, a private investigator living on Oahu, Hawaii. The series ran from 1980 to 1988 in first-run broadcast on the American CBS television network.
According to the...
The Rockford Files
The Rockford Files is an American detective (private investigator) television drama originally aired on the NBC television network between September 13, 1974 and January 10, 1980; it has remained in constant syndication to the present day. The show...
Have Gun — Will Travel
Have Gun — Will Travel is an American Western television series that aired on CBS from 1957 through 1963. It was rated either number three or number four in the Nielsen ratings during each year of its first four seasons. It was one of the few...
The Shield
The Shield is an American television drama series which aired on FX Networks in the United States and other networks internationally. Known for its controversial portrayal of corrupt police officers, it was originally advertised as "Rampart" in...
The Streets of San Francisco
The Streets of San Francisco is a 1970s television police drama filmed on location in San Francisco, California, USA, and produced by Quinn Martin Productions, with the first season produced in association with Warner Bros. Television (QM produced...
The Untouchables
The Untouchables is a television series that ran from 1959 to 1963 on the American Broadcasting Company. Based on the memoir of the same name by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley, it fictionalized the experiences of Eliot Ness, a real-life Prohibition...
The Wild Wild West
The Wild Wild West is an American television series that ran on CBS for four seasons (104 episodes) from September 17, 1965 to April 4, 1969.
Developed at a time when the television western was losing ground to the spy genre, this show was conceived...
Maverick
Maverick is a comedy-western television series created by Roy Huggins that ran from September 22, 1957 to July 8, 1962 on ABC and featured James Garner, Jack Kelly, Roger Moore, and Robert Colbert as the poker-playing traveling Mavericks (Bret, Bart...
Award Nominations:
Beauty and the Beast
Beauty and the Beast is an American television series which first aired on CBS in 1987. Creator Ron Koslow's updated version of the fairy tale has a double focus: the relationship between Vincent (Ron Perlman), a mythic, noble man-beast, and his...
Homicide: Life on the Street
Homicide: Life on the Street was an American television police procedural series chronicling the work of a fictional Baltimore Police Department homicide unit. It ran for seven seasons on the NBC network from 1993 to 1999 and then was followed by a...
Peter Gunn
Peter Gunn is an American private eye television series which aired on the NBC (produced by Revue Productions) and later ABC (produced by MGM Television) television networks from 1958 to 1961. The show's creator (and also writer and director on...
Quincy, M.E.
Quincy, M.E. is a United States television series from Universal Studios that aired from October 3, 1976, to September 5, 1983, on NBC. It stars Jack Klugman in the title role, a Los Angeles County medical examiner. The show was based on a Canadian...
Road to Avonlea
Road to Avonlea is a Emmy Award Winning television series which was first broadcast in Canada, Saudi Arabia and the United States between 1990 and 1996. It was created by Kevin Sullivan and produced by Sullivan Films (later Sullivan Entertainment)...
I Spy
I Spy is an American television secret agent adventure series. It ran for three seasons on NBC from 1965 to 1968 and teamed Robert Culp as international tennis player Kelly Robinson with Bill Cosby as his trainer, Alexander Scott. In reality, they...
Kung Fu
Kung Fu (1972–1975) is an American television series which starred David Carradine. It was created by Ed Spielman, directed and produced by Jerry Thorpe, and developed by Herman Miller, who was also a writer for, and co-producer of, the series. The...
The Practice
The Practice is an American legal drama created by David E. Kelley centering on the partners and associates at a Boston law firm. The show won the Emmy in 1998 and 1999 for Best Drama Series, and spawned the successful spin-off series Boston Legal,...
Moonlighting
Moonlighting was an American television series that first aired on ABC from March 3, 1985 to May 14, 1989 with a total of 67 episodes. The show starred Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd as private detectives and was a mixture of drama, comedy and...
St. Elsewhere
St. Elsewhere is a U.S. drama television series that originally ran on NBC from October 26, 1982 to May 25, 1988. The series is set at St. Eligius, a decaying urban teaching hospital in Boston's South End neighborhood. The hospital's nickname, "St....
The Danny Thomas Show
The Danny Thomas Show (known as Make Room for Daddy during the first three seasons) is a sitcom which ran from 1953 to 1957 on ABC and from 1957 to 1964 on CBS. A revival series known as Make Room for Granddaddy aired on ABC from 1970 to 1971.
In...
The Mod Squad
The Mod Squad is a television series that ran on ABC from September 24, 1968 until August 23, 1973. This series starred Michael Cole, Peggy Lipton, Clarence Williams III and Tige Andrews. The executive producers of the series were Aaron Spelling and...
L.A. Law
L.A. Law is an American television legal drama that ran from 1986 to 1994. L.A. Law reflected the social and cultural ideologies of the 1980s and early 1990s and many of the cases on the show dealt with hot topic issues such as abortion, racism, gay...
77 Sunset Strip
77 Sunset Strip is an hour-length American television private detective series created by Roy Huggins and starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Roger Smith, and Edd Byrnes.
The show was the subject of an ownership battle between Roy Huggins and Warner...
Award Nominations:
Baretta
Baretta is a American detective television series which ran on ABC from 1975 to 1978. The show was a milder version of a successful 1973–74 ABC series, Toma, starring Tony Musante as chameleon-like, real-life New Jersey police officer David Toma....
Cannon
Cannon is a detective series which ran on CBS from 1971 to 1976. The series was a Quinn Martin production, and featured many of the company's well-known stylistic quirks. Cannon marked the first time a QM series aired on a network other than ABC....
Ben Casey
Ben Casey is a medical drama series which ran on ABC from 1961 to 1966. The show was known for its iconic opening titles, which consisted of a hand drawing the symbols "♂, ♀, *, †, ∞" on a chalkboard, as cast member Sam Jaffe intoned, "Man, woman,...
Tales from the Crypt
Tales from the Crypt, sometimes titled HBO's Tales from the Crypt, is a horror anthology American TV series that ran from 1989 to 1996 on the premium cable channel HBO. The title was based on the 1950s EC Comics series of the same name and most of...
Family
Family is a television drama series that aired on ABC from 1976 to 1980. Creative control of the show was split between executive producers Leonard Goldberg, Aaron Spelling and Mike Nichols. A total of 86 episodes were produced.
The show featured...
Without a Trace
Without a Trace is an American television drama which originally ran on CBS from September 26, 2002 to May 19, 2009. The series is set in New York City and is about a fictitious full-time FBI missing persons unit.
Each episode usually follows the...
Boston Legal
Boston Legal is an American legal drama-comedy (dramedy) created by David E. Kelley, which originally ran on ABC from October 3, 2004 to December 8, 2008. A spin-off of the long-running series The Practice, Boston Legal followed the personal and...
Picket Fences
Picket Fences is a 60-minute American television drama centering around the residents of the fictional community of Rome, Wisconsin. The show initially ran from September 1, 1992, to June 26, 1996, on the CBS television network in the United States....
The Defenders
The Defenders is an Emmy-winning American courtroom drama series which ran on CBS from 1961–1965. It starred E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed as father-and-son defense attorneys who specialized in legally complex cases, with defendants such as neo...
Trapper John, M.D.
Trapper John, M.D. is an American television medical drama and spin-off of the film MASH, about a lovable surgeon who became a mentor and father figure in San Francisco, California. The show ran on CBS from September 23, 1979, to September 4, 1986....
Kojak
Kojak is an American television series starring Telly Savalas as the eponymous, bald New York City Police Department Detective Lieutenant Theo Kojak. It aired from October 24, 1973 to March 18, 1978 on CBS. It took the time slot of the popular...
Deadwood
Deadwood is an American Western drama television series created, produced and almost entirely written by David Milch. The series aired on the premium cable network HBO from 21 March 2004 to 27 August 2006, spanning three 12-episode seasons. Set in...
