Whenever the Emmy Awards roll around each year and certain stars are nominated, fans at home are constantly wondering if they have won in the past. It's hard to keep track of who has been nominated and who has won. There are a lot of talented stars nominated each year, including Nobody Want This star Kristen Bell, who landed a nod for the Netflix romantic comedy series.
Bell has been a fixture on our screens for two decades and counting. She earned her breakthrough role in the titular role of the UPN teen mystery drama series Veronica Mars, a role she returned to in both a movie and (overly hated) revival season. While she made the leap to the big screen in hit movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Frozen, Bell has also scored multiple TV hits.
After Veronica Mars ended on The CW in 2007, she joined the cast of NBC's Heroes and later starred in Showtime's House of Lies and continued narrating The CW's teen drama series Gossip Girl (another iconic role!). Before landing a huge hit on Netflix last year, Bell's next biggest TV role arrived in 2016 in the NBC comedy The Good Place. But did Bell win an Emmy Award for her roles in any of these shows? Unfortunately, the star got her first nomination this year.
Kristen Bell earned her first Emmy nomination for Nobody Wants This
As surprising as it might be, Kristen Bell landed her first-ever Primetime Emmy Award nomination in 2025 for her performance in Netflix's Nobody Wants This. She was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for her role as Joanne. By far, it's the role that she has received the most award nominations for, especially from major institutions like these.
Bell was previously nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award in 2019 for the shortform series Momsplaining with Kristen Bell and won a Children's and Family Emmy Award for Outstanding Preschool Animated Series in 2025 as an executive producer of The Tiny Chef Show. The series was also nominated in 2024.
Prior to Nobody Wants This, Bell earned her first Golden Globe Award nomination for The Good Place in 2019. While much of the cast of the NBC comedy earned Emmy nominations, she was unjustly snubbed year after year. Bell's performance as Eleanor Shellstrop was not only some of the best comedy work in her career, but it was the anchor of the entire series.
Bell's award snubs don't begin with The Good Place, though. Anyone who has watched Veronica Mars knows that she should have been nominated for the first two seasons at least, and she probably would have been if the show was on one of the "big four" broadcast networks. Back then, Lauren Graham and Keri Russell were able to score Golden Globe nominations for The WB's Gilmore Girls and Felicity (which Russell won for), but Bell for some reason was underrated.
The first season finale of Veronica Mars, one of the most captivating episodes of television ever (if you know you know!), should have been part of the reel to secure Bell's first Emmy Award nomination. She was excellent in that episode and in that show as a whole. The role asked so much from her as she often towed the line between quippy comedy and intense drama, and she was perfect at it all.
Even before Nobody Wants This came along, Bell's work in Netflix's dark comedy limited series The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window deserved recognition. She's the sole reason that show worked, but everyone was far too scandalized by the intentionally long title to try to understand the satire. But if you got it, you got it.
Thankfully, Bell finally is being recognized for her work and is clearly on the path taking home the hardware she has earned. Everything happens for a reason, and Bell probably isn't too torn up about missing out on nominations and awards. However, as a huge fan who has been watching everything she's been in since 2004, I'm selfishly annoyed on her behalf that it's taken this long.
The 77th Primetime Emmy Awards air on Sunday, Sept. 14 at 8 p.m. ET on CBS.