Innholdsfortegnelse for Emmy Special Issue 21A June 2018 i The Hollywood Reporter

As recently as 1998, every show nominated for the best drama series Emmy was recognized for a season comprising at least 20 episodes. Last year, however, the episode counts of the nominated seasons were eight (Netflix’s Stranger Things), 10 (AMC’s Better Call Saul, Netflix’s The Crown, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and HBO’s Westworld), 13 (Netflix’s House of Cards) and 18 (NBC’s This Is Us). This is the new normal. In the early years of TV, the broadcast networks commissioned weekly episodes year-round, apart from summer, resulting in 39-episode seasons. That volume proved expensive and a grind for talent, so, by the 1970s, the default number shrank to 22 or 24. But, even at that figure, rare was the show that could consistently sustain quality and interest. That’s why some started…

Language matters to Tanya Saracho, which is precisely why some characters on her Starz half-hour drama, Vida, speak only Spanish — with no English translation. “What you’ll miss maybe is an inside joke,” says the showrunner, who came to Hollywood just a few short years ago from the world of Chicago theater. “But you don’t ever miss story.” And the story of Vida is fresh and topical: After the death of their mother, two Mexican-American sisters return to the Boyle Heights neighborhood where they grew up and confront a host of hot-button social issues, from gentrification — “gentrification of a Latinx space by upwardly mobile Latinx,” Saracho explains — to gender identity. Saracho, 42, spoke with THR about creating a new kind of writers room and the joy of introducing…

Elisabeth Moss “As one of the only female executive producers, obviously there’s a weight there,” says Moss, photographed April 29, of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “I have a perspective that nobody else will have, and that’s so respected and appreciated.” Matthew Rhys “It was a strange one because it was so heavily steeped in truth, but it’s so fantastical,” says The Americans star, photographed April 28, of the show, which wrapped its final season May 30. Of the finale, he adds, “The challenge was where to land it tonally.” Rachel Brosnahan “The best part about our show has been that it hasn’t changed the conversation at all,” says Brosnahan, photographed April 11, of Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. “It just has added to a conversation that has been swelling.” Ray…

Six-time Emmy recipient Alan Alda has never directly said his favorite trophy was the one presented to him by Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams in 1979 for writing in a comedy series (he already had two acting and one directing win by then). However, it’s the only Emmy he accepted after doing a cartwheel on the way to the stage. “I was really, really happy,” he said later regarding the acrobatic move done at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Alda, 82, has received 34 Emmy noms, with 26 of them for the 11 seasons he was on M*A*S*H. Other noms have come for everything from a guesting gig on 30 Rock in 2009 to the 1974 TV movie 6 Rms Riv Vu. But it was for M*A*S*H’s “Inga” episode (which saw…

The phenomenon known as “bingeing” isn’t a particularly new one, though it might feel like it is. People have been inhaling television at a questionable pace since the first season of The X-Files was released as a DVD box set in 2000. (Yes, you could’ve taped blocks of Twilight Zone marathons, which started in the early 1980s, but only the rare nerd did that.) And there has been “TV” available on the internet for more than a decade now. Remember 2006’s lonelygirl15? How about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which Joss Whedon dropped in 2008? But until 2013, when Netflix released House of Cards, there had never been first-run episodic television content released that could be ingested all at once — with an entire season available at the push of a…

In the past two decades, Kenneth Lonergan’s original screenplays, for films like Manchester by the Sea, Margaret and You Can Count on Me, have earned him critical acclaim and awards attention. (The first landed Lonergan his original screenplay Oscar in 2017.) But with Howards End, the miniseries that debuted stateside on Starz in April, the writer, director and playwright exercised a different kind of storytelling muscle: literary adaptation. E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel had been adapted before — by James Ivory in 1992 (the film won three Oscars, and Ivory was nominated). But Lonergan saw an opportunity to dig into the novel in greater detail through a four-part miniseries (a co-production with BBC One, it premiered in the U.K. in November). “Anytime I’ve ever tried to adapt a book for a…

Barbra Streisand is not just one of only 18 people to achieve EGOT status (if you count honorary awards). She’s also one of the 10 best-selling music artists in history, has the most top 10 albums and the most No. 1 albums of any female recording artist, and is the only singer in history with at least one No. 1 album in each of six consecutive decades. Those albums served as the backbone for Streisand’s 2016 concert tour, which was immortalized in the Netflix variety special Barbra: The Music … The Mem’ries … The Magic (she also co-directed the film with Jim Gable). The 76-year-old recently sat down with THR on the Warner Bros. lot to talk about her hit songs, past TV specials and why she doesn’t love singing…

After one year of starring in ABC’s runaway hit medical series The Good Doctor, Freddie Highmore has finally landed on the most unexpected thing about portraying a life-saving surgeon for millions of viewers every week. “The first thing everyone thinks about wearing hospital scrubs is true — they are surprisingly comfortable,” he says. “It’s like walking around in pajamas all day long. I really should get myself a pair to take home!” His Good Doctor wardrobe isn’t the only thing that’s a comfortable fit for Highmore. The same goes for his role as Shaun Murphy, a surgical resident who has autism and savant syndrome. The series, which is set in San Jose, California, and shot its 18 episodes primarily in Vancouver, averaged more than 15 million viewers a week, making…