It makes all the sense in the world that Rami Malek’s Emmy win for best dramatic actor should have wide-reaching ramifications. After all, Mr. Robot’s Elliot Alderson is TV’s biggest disruptor.

When Jon Hamm finally won his Emmy for playing Don Draper last year, there was a bigger TV question lingering in the air: Would this be the end of an era? Not just for Mad Men, but for the Drapers of the TV landscape? For over a decade, the best actor in a dramatic role category has gone—with the exception of Kyle Chandler in Friday Night Lights—to the men behaving badly who dominated prestige drama for so long. James Gandolfini, James Spader, Damian Lewis, Jef Daniels, Michael Chiklis, and Bryan Cranston made sure that the white male antihero was healthily represented on the Emmys stage.

Would that tradition continue in this new Peak TV landscape, where increasingly diverse voices and points of view are given room to make their mark? The beginning of the Emmys night would indicate otherwise, as host Jimmy Kimmel joked that the awards show was almost too diverse. And that was before Kate McKinnon, S.N.L.’s first openly lesbian cast member, and Susanne Bier, a rare female director in a sea of male competitors, took home their trophies.

But when Egyptian-American Rami Malek took the stage to collect his award, he gave all of us a clearer view of what the future of television might look like. “Please tell me you’re seeing this too,” Malek joked, a reference to the hallucinations his mentally ill character experiences. Malek went on to underline why this win is such a drastic shift: “I play a young man who is, like so many of us, profoundly alienated,” he said. Unlike the brash white men brimming with bravado who have owned this category in the past, Elliot offers a painfully distorted world view.

It’s a unique perspective, but one that, Malek points out, many of us share. “I want to honor the Elliots. There’s a little bit of Elliot in all of us,” he concluded. And now, thanks to Peak TV, there’s room for all the Elliots of the world to have their moment.