Innholdsfortegnelse for Emmy Special Issue 19A May 2019 i The Hollywood Reporter

In the Peak TV era, performers not Emmy-nominated for their show’s first season rarely receive a nomination further into that show’s run — most are written off in favor of performers from buzzy newer shows. This year, however, may be different. An unusual number of 2018’s nominees aren’t eligible to return because their show ended (e.g., The Americans) or wasn’t on the air over the past year (e.g., Atlanta, The Crown, The Handmaid’s Tale, Homeland, Silicon Valley, Stranger Things and Westworld). And though a few shows that were off the air last year have returned (e.g., House of Cards and Veep), there will still be a lot of vacancies that seem likely to benefit people whose work was previously overlooked. Take, for instance, best actress in a drama. Five of…

When they first went to work creating the National Geographic Channel’s limited series The Hot Zone, Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson were excited to dig into this true story about the origins of the Ebola virus. It was going to be a thrill, Souders recalls, “to get into the nitty-gritty of it all and realize that viruses were more terrifying than anything we could write as fiction.” That excitement lasted right up until a new Ebola outbreak in Congo started making news just as they started production in August 2018. Suddenly, it all got uncomfortably real and the excitement turned into urgency. “Every month we were working on this, it became more and more relevant,” explains Souders. “The epidemic kept growing and growing, getting worse and presenting new challenges for…

Known for playing Ricardo Montalbán’s lovable sidekick in 1970s ABC series Fantasy Island, the late Hervé Villechaize is now the subject of HBO’s My Dinner With Hervé. The film, which bowed Oct. 20, is a recounting by journalist turned filmmaker Sacha Gervasi of several interviews he conducted with Villechaize (played by Peter Dinklage) just days before the actor took his own life due to chronic health problems. Gervasi reveals how his unique film found its way to the screen. How did the project come together? It was written initially as a 34-page screenplay, which got me into UCLA film school in 1995. Once it was a feature script, it took a long time to develop it. Peter Dinklage and I had been talking about [the project] since The Station Agent…

Daughters of the Sexual Revolution director Dana Adam Shapiro considers himself a proponent of female empowerment. But, until he dove into his documentary about the origins of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, he didn’t see what professional cheerleading had to do with it. He remembers watching the Super Bowl with his son and thinking: “They still have cheerleaders?” He’s not the only one to initially scoff. When he took the documentary onto the festival circuit, he’d ask other festgoers what movies they were most excited to see. Were they interested in that one about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders? The question garnered more eye rolls than enthusiasm. “That happened so often,” he tells THR. “There were so many eye rolls, just on the topic alone. Like, ‘I don’t want to see that.’…

In the past, the underlying aim of most natural history documentaries was to raise awareness of endangered species. Today, it’s about raising awareness of an endangered planet. To varying degrees, climate change figures in many of this year’s Emmy hopefuls, including Nat Geo’s Hostile Planet, a six-part series executive produced by Oscar-winning cinematographer Guillermo Navarro. Each episode explores a distinct habitat and the struggle for life therein made more intense by depleted conditions resulting from global warming. Netflix’s eight-part series Our Planet delivers audiences into the familiar hands of 92-year-old narrator David Attenborough, a mentor to nature doc veteran and executive producer Keith Scholey. Both have witnessed firsthand the ravages of climate change over decades. The Flood, Nat Geo’s two-part series narrated by Angela Bassett, focuses on a unique ecosystem…

On a chilly Utah night in January, Sacha turned Sundance into a raucous Wu-Tang Clan reunion, assembling luminaries including Ghostface Killah, Cappadonna, U-God, Masta Killa and RZA to premiere the Showtime documentary series Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men. It traces the Wu from impoverished Staten Island roots to the pinnacle of hip-hop through internal dissent, the death of founding member Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the fiasco of the one-of-a-kind album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Jenkins spoke with THR about Of Mics and Men, which, after its Showtime debut May 10, could stage its next Wu-Tang Clan reunion at the Emmys. On a list of your accomplishments, where do you rank assembling the Wu-Tang Clan at Sundance? It was definitely an achievement. On the red carpet, I was…

Quincy Jones, who’s the subject of the Netflix documentary Quincy (which missed out on an Oscar nom but has high Emmy hopes) got his first television credit as a producer with the 1973 CBS special Duke Ellington … We Love You Madly. Jones, then 39, already had composed music for a long list of films and TV shows, but on Madly, besides being a musical arranger, he shared production duties with Bud Yorkin. The 90-minute live show was filmed at L.A.’s Shubert Theatre, a 2,100-seat venue that sat on the Century City site where the CAA building now stands. “It was one of the most amazing shows I ever went to,” says George Schlatter, producer of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, who was in the audience. “It paved the way for…

A con man murdered by his target’s daughter, who learned her defense skills from The Walking Dead. A renowned politician losing his career over the botched attempted murder of his gay lover. A nail-biting prison escape sending shock waves through asmall community as they discover the escapees’ accomplice is one of their own. With true life this eventful, who needs fiction? Last year’s wave of true-crime series proves that the popular genre still dominates, but not every real-life case makes for compelling television. “Just because it really happened doesn’t mean it’s a story that everybody should be paying attention to,” says Robin Swicord, co-writer of Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, the Netflix miniseries (which debuted May 31) about the Central Park Five. “There are certain kinds of stories that…

Many have tried and mostly failed to adapt Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22. Success for Hulu’s six-part miniseries (executive produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov) hinged on finding just the right actor to play Yossarian, the World War II bombardier at the story’s center. Christopher Abbott, best known for his role on HBO’s Girls, brings to the part a layered performance of a man who slowly descends into madness as he tries to escape from the horrors of the war. Abbott, 33, spoke to THR about his existentialist character, the book’s journey to the small screen and the story’s ability to stand the test of time. Yossarian can be pretty unlikable, but you find yourself rooting for him anyway. How did you handle him as a character? Any actor’s…

David Oyelowo has always been a fan of the Les Misérables musical, but it wasn’t until he picked up Andrew Davies’ script that the star — who’s been Emmy-and Golden Globe-nominated for his work on HBO’s Nightingale and in Ava DuVernay’s Selma — fully appreciated the villainous Inspector Javert. “There was so much more depth and complexity to this character than I ever realized from any iteration I had seen,” he says. Oyelowo, 43, spoke with THR about executive producing and starring on PBS’ six-part Les Mis miniseries (which debuted April 14) and developing his directorial debut, The Water Man, a fantasy drama co-produced by Oprah Winfrey — “or Mum O, as I like to call her.” Javert is one of the most iconic and tragic antagonists in literature and…

About a month into the production of Brexit, HBO’s comedy-drama feature chronicling the anarchic and controversial 2016 political campaign that saw Britain vote to the leave the European Union, screenwriter James Graham posted a tweet. “Please spare a thought for those of us already filming their Brexit TV drama,” it read. “Thanks.” Graham was, of course, joking (he added “P.s we’re fine”), but the message — which landed in July amid yet another round of bitter infighting within the U.K.’s Conservative government over the terms of the departure deal — highlighted the intense difficulty of bringing to the screen a hugely contentious story that wasn’t simply evolving, but looked a lifetime away from ever being resolved. “Coming from a playwright’s point of view you always aspire — although sometimes you…

FREE SOLO Alex Honnold not only scaled El Capitan in Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s death-defying doc, but also ascended to the peak of the Oscar race, winning the award for best documentary feature in March. Also honored with the people’s choice award at TIFF, Nat Geo’s Free Solo charts Honnold’s preparation to free solo climb the famed granite rock formation in Yosemite, a feat he accomplished in June 2017. MINDING THE GAP Bing Liu’s deep dive into the lives of three young skateboarders in their Rust Belt hometown shredded up the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Acquired by Hulu for distribution rights at the fest, the doc picked up the U.S. documentary special jury award for breakthrough filmmaking. Minding the Gap bridged the gap from contender to nominee, as…

CHEF’S TABLE The sixth season of Netflix’s Emmy-winning series highlights Southern chefs Sean Brock and Mashama Bailey, Slow Food Italian butcher Dario Cecchini, and Darjeeling Express’ Asma Khan, whose London staff is all female. One episode features Bailey’s restaurant The Grey in Savannah, Georgia, which is housed in a formerly segregated bus station. “You look at the beauty of survival. You realize how resilient your culture is,” she says. SALT FAT ACID HEAT Everywhere she goes, Samin Nosrat is in search of flavor, basking in the four elements that define good cooking around the world: salt, fat, acid and heat. Based on the Iranian-American culinary star’s best-selling book of the same name, Netflix’s four-parter sees the author and chef flying around the U.S., Italy, Mexico and Japan — searching for…

THE CASE AGAINST ADNAN SYED (HBO) Serial brought Syed’s story to national attention in 2014 as the podcast traced the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, 18-year-old Hae Min Lee, and his conviction in the killing. Amy Berg directed the four-part series, which features interviews with players unheard in the original podcast and new recordings from Syed in prison. LORENA (Amazon) Jordan Peele goes to a different kind of sunken place as executive producer on Amazon’s four-part series. Featuring interviews with both Lorena Bobbitts, Lorena follows the events of her 1993 trial (for cutting off her husband’s penis), which generated scandalous headlines for months that largely ignored her allegations of domestic abuse — an omission rectified here. MAKING A MURDERER: PART 2 (Netflix) Making a Murderer helped ignite the current fascination…

Ultimately, horror series on TV Uare kind of like the demonic characters at the center of their stories. They’re terrifying. They just keep coming at you. And it usually turns out that they were completely misunderstood. “That was one of my favorite challenges with this project — the genre has a history of not being appropriately understood,” says Mike Flanagan, creator and executive producer of the Netflix limited series The Haunting of Hill House, the story of a family coping with the trauma of growing up in a haunted mansion. “[Horror] isn’t necessarily required to have the same integrity of characterization and theme that is expected from a drama. However, horror has an amazing power to take very heavy themes and mix them up in the aesthetic of the genre.”…

On Dec. 28, Netflix members got a year-end surprise: a new Black Mirror thumbnail on the streamer’s homepage signaling that the rumored interactive offering from Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones had finally arrived. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch launched Netflix into the live-action interactive space with an immersive, choose your own adventure-style story after a secret, nearly two-year collaboration between the streaming giant and the Black Mirror duo of Brooker — the Emmy-winning series’ creator and writer — and executive producer Jones. Netflix dropped the film with little promotion, and the strategic marketing approach worked: Bandersnatch soon was trending worldwide on Twitter and in less than 24 hours, Reddit threads and fan sites had created their own flowcharts to track the complex story paths of the film’s branching narrative — the result…

The #MeToo movement has revealed one especially stark fact: When women report workplace sexual harassment or assault, most of the time they’re not believed. Instead, they’re labeled troublemakers or sluts, and they’re often fired or blacklisted while their perpetrators go unpunished. In 2016, after suing Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, claiming sexual harassment, former network host Gretchen Carlson easily could have become yet another woman to be silenced after speaking out. But she continues to tell her story and other women’s, starting with the first of three documentaries airing on Lifetime. Breaking the Silence, which premiered Jan. 14, profiles women around the country — from a fire battalion chief to multiple McDonald’s employees — who reported sexual harassment at work. Carlson, 52, spoke to THR about her journey, the role…

Race and Chicago are not unfamiliar topics for Hoop Dreams director Steve James, but with his 2018 Starz docuseries America to Me, he tackles them in a new and perhaps unexpected way. Using a cinema verité approach, James, 64, follows students through a year at Oak Park and River Forest High School, an elite school in a Chicago suburb that, despite its progressive community, grapples with issues around race. What’s revealed by seemingly mundane moments of students attending class and going to prom is that even in the most diverse neighborhoods, educators, students and families still struggle with the systematic ways in which minority students are disadvantaged. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker spoke to THR about why he chose Oak Park, Illinois, as the setting for the film, how he selected his…

Gypsy Rose G Blanchard didn’t need a wheelchair. She certainly didn’t require a feeding tube. But for the first 20 years of her life, she was forced into a bizarre charade of fake ailments and shuttled in and out of hospitals by her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, who herself suffered from a rare case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. It all came crashing to an end on June 14, 2015, when Gypsy Rose snapped and, along with her boyfriend, stabbed her mother 20 times, killing her. Just three years later, last fall, this real-life tragedy was being re-created on a set in Savannah, Georgia, for The Act, an eighthour limited series for Hulu that stars Patricia Arquette as Dee Dee, Joey King as the Disney princess-loving Gypsy Rose, AnnaSophia Robb…