(Credits: Netflix)

Here is something you probably didn’t expect to read in 2025: Jeremy Saulnier’s action-thriller Rebel Ridge now wears an Emmy crown. It’s not a festival darling or a critic’s pet; it’s an Emmy winner.

This Netflix film walked the red carpet and came out with the ‘Outstanding Television Movie’ award, leaving populist rom-coms like Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and nostalgia fodder family dramas like Nonnas in its dust.

This is a first for the streamer that has been quietly shaping this category for nearly a decade. Every year, it slips in with titles that redefine what a “television movie” is, and now has juries eating out of its digital palm.

Let’s go back to the year 2017, when Black Mirror dropped its season three queer epic ‘San Junipero’. What looked like just another anthology episode stood up as a time-bending love story that left everyone sobbing, proudly walking the coveted Emmy into its green room.

With the scent of novel success wafting in the air, the show doubled down with ‘USS Callister’ the following year, a Star Trek parody that managed to be the trifecta of overtly funny, sometimes terrifying, and deeply sad in one galactic episode. And just when voters thought they knew what to expect, Bandersnatch arrived in 2019, upending the playing field. All of a sudden, you weren’t just watching a Netflix movie; you were controlling fate and choosing endings like some deranged God with a remote. The Academy loved it, and Netflix bagged three wins in three years, all under the Black Mirror umbrella.

Netflix, of course, likes to keep its tentacles busy, and their nonfiction slate was also on fire. Following its ‘Best Documentary’ Emmy win, Ava DuVernay’s 13th in 2017 altered conversations around race and bias in incarceration across America’s prison complex. The year before that, What Happened, Miss Simone? picked up the crown, which gave us a raw look at one of music’s most complicated and mellifluous female baritones.

Now in 2025, Rebel Ridge was a strange hat thrown into the brilliant ring of parodies and documentaries as a pure action-thriller about corruption and systemic injustice, and Emmy voters went for it.

The film follows Terry Richmond, a former Marine played by John Boyega, who gets pulled over in a small town. What should have been a routine traffic stop turns into a dark exposé of the abuse of legal loopholes and the way absolute power corrupts absolutely. It has got the action and tension you would expect, but it’s also shining a light on the real issues hiding beneath the surface.

So yes, Rebel Ridge just became an Emmy winner. And it might feel weird seeing an action-thriller on the same winners list as San Junipero and 13th, but that is what makes Netflix such a menace in this space. You never know which of its experiments will ring the bell.