Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 20A August 2020 i The Hollywood Reporter

One hundred years ago this August, women’s suffrage was codified into law, becoming the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. The change, which prohibits governmental powers from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex, required 36 states to secure ratification and ultimately hinged on a tie-breaking vote from a young legislator who took his mom’s advice. In 2020, the Emmy nominees — from FX on Hulu’s Mrs. America to Netflix’s Unorthodox — remind us that women’s struggle for independence is an ongoing effort. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences is no stranger to female-forward stories that incisively critique gender expectations and gendered oppression. In the past five years alone, the Emmys have honored such sharply drawn shows as Fleabag, Pose, Killing Eve, Transparent, Big Little Lies,…

DOLLY PARTON’S HEARTSTRINGS: ‘THESE OLD BONES’ (NETFLIX) When Dolly Parton was a young girl, a clairvoyant in the Smoky Mountains who went by the name Bones once told her she was meant for greatness. “She told me once that I was anointed. I didn’t know what that meant, but she said it meant that I was going to do big things one day, and that I had a special gift that I needed to share with the world,” said Parton. “And I took that serious.” Parton eventually wrote a song, “These Old Bones,” about the mysterious woman, which was released on the 2002 album Halos & Horns. The story then became the foundation for one of the episodes of Netflix’s eight-episode anthology series Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings. Now nominated for the…

Showrunner Liz Tigelaar had a dilemma on her hands when closing her Hulu adaptation of Celeste Ng’s novel. Should she stick with the original ending or surprise the book’s fans with a new twist? Here she reflects on Reese Witherspoon’s character’s final moments and whether the limited series has more story to tell. The end doesn’t absolve Elena of anything, but it does show her realizing what she’s done and the consequences. It’s that theme of the show, I think — it’s like, how can we know who we really are if we’re too afraid to look at ourselves? If we’re not willing to look at the parts of us that kind of scare us to look at, how can we really see ourselves? The fact that some people are…

MRS. AMERICA (FX on Hulu) The true story of the movement to pass the Equal Rights Amendment earned 10 nominations, including actress nods for Cate Blanchett, Uzo Aduba, Margo Martindale and Tracey Ullman. UNBELIEVABLE (Netflix) The powerful eight-episode series following two detectives (Toni Collette and Merritt Wever) investigating a series of rapes garnered three nominations (including one for Collette).…

HBO’s doc series about the rigging of the McDonald’s Monopoly game, helmed by James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte, was so fascinating to Mark Wahlberg that he signed on as an executive producer. You mostly produce narrative fare. What was it about this doc that drew you in? The story for McMillions is wild and has so many twists and turns. You have the mafia, FBI, all of these unsuspecting people roped into the scam — it almost feels like a scripted series. Since just about everyone played the McDonald’s Monopoly Game, I knew viewers would be drawn to it. And the moment I saw FBI Agent Doug Mathews on camera, I knew he was gold. As a producer, what was your biggest input as the project went through development…

BEASTIE BOYS STORY The hip-hop trio is the center of this Apple TV+ doc, co-written and directed by the group’s longtime collaborator Spike Jonze. The film celebrates the decades-long friendship and creative collaboration between Mike D, Ad-Rock and the late MCA. THE APOLLO The famed Harlem theater is the focus of this HBO documentary directed by Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams. Following a staging of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, the film offers a history of the landmark for Black cultural achievement. LAUREL CANYON: A PLACE IN TIME The two-part Epix documentary looks at the rustic center of the singer-songwriter-driven California sound in the late ’60s and early ’70s, featuring appearances from music legends Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley, Michelle Phillips and Graham Nash.…

For the past two months, protests have provoked difficult conversations around social justice, race and inequality, discussions that have often been aided or informed by storytelling in its many forms. One story in particular that has risen to the challenge, both as a novel and a limited series: Little Fires Everywhere. A New York Times best-seller, the sophomore novel by Celeste Ng debuted to national acclaim in 2017, with the Times’ review calling it “an utterly engrossing, often heartbreaking, deeply empathetic experience.” The story follows the collision between two families and the mothers who lead them: Elena Richardson, the matriarch of a seemingly perfect suburban family, and Mia Warren, a single mother and artist who raises her daughter wherever her art happens to take her. The eight-part Hulu adaptation, which…

Because Unorthodox dives deep into the culture of the Hasidic Jewish community and includes plenty of dialogue in Yiddish, the creators needed the help of an expert to make sure they got the details right. Enter Eli Rosen, an actor for New Yiddish Rep, a Yiddish-language theater in New York. Initially, Rosen, who was born and raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, was hired to help translate the scripts into Yiddish, but eventually he was also brought on as a cultural consultant to coach the actors on their Yiddish (lead actress Shira Haas and other members of the cast were learning the language phonetically) and also to serve as a discerning set of eyes about details on the show. Plus, he stepped in front of the camera to…

When The Great Hack premiered at Sundance in January 2019, and months later launched on Netflix in June, a global pandemic was not a reality most envisioned in the near future. The Emmy-nominated documentary from husband-and-wife team Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, who previously earned an Oscar nomination for the 2013 doc The Square (which Noujaim directed and Amer produced), is not about a global health crisis. Rather, the film concerns the data that the public hands over to tech companies willingly every day — and what happens when that valuable information is exploited for profit and weaponized for political gain. For those now extremely aware of the potential contagions that float in the air, the early moments in The Great Hack are particularly unsettling. Incorporating animated elements that root…

CARL REINER, 98 The Dick Van Dyke Show After starring as the quintessential straight man opposite Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour, the Bronx native took a crack at creating a sitcom revolving around a TV comedy writer — and wound up penning the first 39 episodes of the iconic CBS series himself. “Most of the shows [on the air then] were battles of the sexes. [I Love] Lucy certainly was a battle of the sexes,” he once said. “A lot of deception, a lot of people fooling everybody. The Van Dyke show was based on my wife and I. We were worthy adversaries, we argued about things — but we were two against the world.” FRED WILLARD, 86 Fernwood 2 Night A master of comic…