Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special, 28B, August 9, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

Ted Lasso’s season one launch on Apple TV+ might have been the result of divine timing. Five months into the pandemic, and with an anxiety-inducing presidential election around the corner, Americans needed a little escape. The August premiere of the Jason Sudeikis-led comedy gave viewers something missing in the comedy landscape: a deliberately paced and sincere series with gentle touches. Sudeikis’ folksy college football coach — who finds himself a fish out of water when he accepts a job leading an English football club — isn’t representative of the “ugly American” trope (he does display strains of the “ignorant American” with his lack of knowledge of soccer, but without that, there would be no premise). Instead, he embraces the exoticism of England — for the Midwestern Lasso, England is somehow…

Halfway between a black comedy and Hitchcockian psycho-drama, HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant follows Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco), a fun-loving flight attendant whose life spirals out of control after she wakes up next to a dead man. It’s also a story about addiction, confronting the past and how friendships bend or break under pressure, as in the case of Cassie and her co-worker Megan (Rosie Perez). Even though their onscreen friendship is sometimes on the rocks, the love is real between stars Cuoco (who also served as executive producer and is nominated for outstanding lead actress in a comedy) and Perez (who is Emmy-nominated as a supporting actress). The pair recently spoke to THR about how they came to collaborate, figuring out The Flight Attendant’s zany tone on the fly…

FEATHERINGTON MANOR Bridgerton NETFLIX Netflix’s hit period drama set in Regency-era London involved many sets built in the British capital, including this entrance hall of the Featheringtons, neighbors to the Bridgertons. It’s also among the London sets that segue onto a location. “In designing it, we were restricted to matching the space. We solved this by creating an anti-space between the sumptuous foyer and the door, which replicates our location,” explains production designer Will Hughes-Jones. “This allowed us to stretch our creative wings and add the beautiful plaster details on the walls, which were inspired by architects John Nash and Robert Adams.” Hughes-Jones’ team also researched existing British houses for inspiration, particularly Osterley Park and Claydon House. “Many of the elements on the walls of the set were hand-sculpted for…

SNL creator Lorne Michaels “doesn’t want us to lose the castmember,” says makeup department head and designer Louie Zakarian of the series’ approach to creating caricatures of present-day political figures. “We want to capture features of the person we’re doing a caricature of, but we still have to see that it’s, you know, Kate McKinnon as Rudy Giuliani. That’s the fine line we end up walking every week.” The team used prosthetics to transform McKinnon. “We started out by receding her hairline, giving her nasolabial folds and some jowls to age her,” Zakarian explains. She also wore a wig to complete the look, which needed to be a “quick change” due to the show’s live broadcast. “That’s one of the things we always have to keep in mind when we’re…

Long before she battled monsters both human and otherworldly as Letitia Lewis on HBO’s Lovecraft Country — a turn that earned her an Emmy nomination for lead actress in a drama this year — Jurnee Smollett was getting laughs from a studio audience as little Denise Frazer on ABC’s Full House. Born into a family of performers (she and her five siblings, Jussie, Jazz, Jojo, Jocqui and Jake, played fictionalized versions of themselves on the short-lived 1994 ABC sitcom On Our Own), Smollett was a natural in front of the camera, booking modeling gigs at just 10 months old. In 1992, at age 4, she scored a recurring part on the fifth season of the hit sitcom about a widower (Bob Saget) raising his three daughters with the help of…

COMEDY ACTOR ANTHONY ANDERSON Black-ish, ABC The actor has now been nominated for all seven seasons in which he has played Dre Johnson Sr. on ABC’s popular sitcom, one of two network shows represented in this category. He has yet to win, but that could change given that the seventh season — with 21 episodes, more than any of this category’s other nominees’ seasons — clocked in at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and received seven total noms, including best comedy. MICHAEL DOUGLAS The Kominsky Method, Netflix The 76-year-old legend has been nominated for all three seasons of Chuck Lorre’s single-camera Netflix show. For season three — the show’s last, which received six total noms — he also shares in its best comedy nom. The season comprised fewer episodes than…

1813 BRIDGERTON (NETFLIX) At the opulent Danbury Ball, the debut season’s most promising young lady, Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) — clad in a romantic, floral-embroidered cap-sleeve gown — literally bumps into society’s prodigal son, the steamy Duke of Hastings, Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page). “[Her blue gown] best represents what you would eventually see throughout Bridgerton,” says costume designer Ellen Mirojnick. Blessed with creative license and a generous budget, the costume department of more than 230 members worked tirelessly as a bespoke factory, custom-building every piece in authentic early 19th century silhouettes, from undergarments to gowns to shoes. Mirojnick and fellow designer John Glaser mined other centuries, from Victorian details to ’20s and ’60s fabrics to 3D and laser-cutting techniques from Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel Spring 2018 runway. Their anachronistic treasure trove…

The Mandalorian DISNEY+ Production designer Doug Chiang began to plan the forest planet Corvus, a virtual environment, early on with executive producer Dave Filoni, who also directed the episode titled “The Jedi.” “Unfortunately, we had fires in Northern California, and some of them were very close to Dave’s home,” Chiang says. “That drew the inspiration in terms of this desolate landscape.” Adds production designer Andrew L. Jones: “We did actually go out to the burned forests around Los Angeles to get samples and scan them. It’s a terrible, terrible situation, but it inspired the design quite heavily.” The films of Akira Kurosawa (also an influence on George Lucas) were a reference point for the castle’s “Japanese feudal” design. Perry Mason HBO The interior courtroom of the L.A. County Courthouse was…

By their own assessment, the cast of HBO’s Lovecraft Country spent a lot of time off in their own corners during production. The lauded series, recently christened with 18 Emmy nominations, spent much of its first and only season scattering characters to the proverbial wind — before they all collided in the bloody finale. “It’s like when you’re in the library,” says Jurnee Smollett, who played Leti. “Everybody’s just kind of doing their own research and their own work.” Smollett, up for outstanding lead actress in a drama, and costar Aunjanue Ellis, nominated for outstanding supporting actress in a drama, recently reunited over Zoom to talk about the late series’ unique place in their careers and the overall TV catalog. Not only did Lovecraft Country center a troupe of Black…

The Crown NETFLIX Diana’s iconic haircut was a key to transforming Emmy nominee Emma Corrin (pictured, left) into the princess and involved six different wigs during the course of the season, which covers roughly 12 years. “We [created] a shape initially that was quite round, very natural and very soft, because we felt like that would emphasize Emma’s youth and the vulnerable person who Charles first meets,” explains hair and makeup designer Cate Hall. “As she becomes more media-worn, we wanted the hair to look more processed. We were dying the roots to give it some shadow and highlighting it more and more. The Princess of Wales was using those styling techniques as a kind of armor against the media. We wanted her to look ever more manufactured, and we…

Songwriting duo Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez were nominated for Emmys this season for WandaVision’s main title theme music and song, “Agatha All Along” — which in the Marvel/Disney+ series reveals that nosy neighbor Agnes, played by Kathryn Hahn, actually was the witch Agatha Harkness … all along. The story is set in a world where the characters live in decades of TV sitcoms, and as such, “All of the songs were sort of conceived by the writers because they knew the style of songs they wanted for all the intros through the decades,” explains Lopez. “The one that they had written for that episode was called ‘That’s So Agatha.’ I guess the idea [was] kind of like That’s So Raven. We sort of struggled with that, [though] we loved…