The all-new Hollywood Reporter offers unprecedented access to the people, studios, networks and agencies that create the magic in Hollywood. Published weekly, the oversized format includes exceptional photography and rich features.
For someone who purports to hate the Emmys, Donald Trump has given the awards show a lot of attention over the years. As The Hollywood Reporter was the first to report, Trump has been a member of the TV Academy since June 2004, six months after his reality show The Apprentice premiered. That program generated massive ratings for NBC, but it never clicked with Emmy voters. Its first two seasons were nominated for reality competition series, but it lost both times to The Amazing Race and was never nominated again — to Trump’s everlasting fury. “I got screwed out of an Emmy,” he said of his first loss during an Apprentice episode a decade later. “Everybody thought I was going to win it. In fact, when they announced the winner,…
Christine Baranski • THE GOOD FIGHT (CBS All Access) After thinking she’d be able to spend her golden years retired in Italy, Diane Lockhart (Baranski) loses almost all of her equity in a financial scam and is forced to roll up her sleeves and un-retire in this sequel series to The Good Wife. FAVORITE THING ABOUT HER CHARACTER “The first episode is just a series of spectacular setbacks for Diane, even having to formally end her marriage. It really was a wonderfully challenging thing to explore that for the character, who we’ve seen over the course of seven years [on The Good Wife]. We’ve seen her suffer a lot of ups and downs — the death of Will Gardner, her own bankruptcy issues with the firm — but she’s always landed on…
ANDREA MARTIN Great News (NBC) Martin, a twotime Emmy winner (and My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s Aunt Toula!), could add a third trophy to her mantle for the meddling mom she plays in the Peacock’s newsroom comedy, executive produced by Tina Fey and created by her protege, Tracy Wigfield. KATE MCKINNON Saturday Night Live (NBC) McKinnon displayed perhaps the most versatility of any comedy actress this season, segueing from Hillary Clinton to Kellyanne Conway to Jeff Sessions in SNL’s most watched season in decades. Last year’s Emmy winner is the one to beat. ZOE KRAVITZ Big Little Lies (HBO) Even without knowing the full backstory of her character (a history with domestic abuse — revealed in the original novel but not in the series), Kravitz’s performance in the shocking finale brought her…
Most of the time, telling someone that big things come in small packages is just a convenient way to justify the last-minute purchase of a Starbucks gift card as a birthday present. When you’re creating television shows, however, it turns out that big things actually can come in small packages. For proof, one need look no further than the limited series that aired in the past year. Whether it’s the inequities of the criminal justice system (The Night Of), domestic abuse (Big Little Lies), immigration and anti-Semitism (Genius), human trafficking (American Crime), police shootings (Shots Fired), sexism (Feud: Bette and Joan) or racial unrest (Guerrilla), short-order shows explored some of the biggest ideas on TV. “For me, this [limited-series] format is the exact right way to tell a story,” explains…
While Paolo Sorrentino was making HBO’s The Young Pope, he considered its 10 episodes a “long film.” Through a translator, the Italian director spoke with THR about bringing his tale of the first American pope to life. What was the biggest challenge in putting this project together? Because materials connected to the theme of the Catholic Church are so vast, complicated and full of derivations, the biggest challenge was to find a synthesis in such an ocean. Is it more or less challenging to create a fictional story about this very real institution? It’s slightly more complicated because the coefficient of imagination has to be kept in check in virtue of an adherence to a real institution, which is alive and ongoing. What were some of the more difficult aspects of the production? Set…
Rather than tell a sprawling tale that has to sustain itself for several weeks, these TV movies took two hours to tell a story that was much more specific. “Killing Reagan was about an incident that occurred in a few seconds,” explains Rod Lurie, director of the NatGeo film, an examination of the 1981 shooting of the then-president. “The writer [Eric Simonson] was completely enamored with the political world surrounding the 1980 presidential campaign. We had to ask what the movie we were making was really about and, in the end, it was about that day he was shot.” There were plenty of avenues director Charles Sturridge could have wandered down with his film Churchill’s Secret. But since Winston Churchill’s life has been thoroughly explored on TV and in film, he opted…
