Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 39A, November 19, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

I’m grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to help create the visual language and style for HBO’s Insecure. From the beginning, I felt strongly that this show deserved a look and feel beyond a traditional comedy. The show is so specific, and its complicated relationships and grounded characters made me a fan in season one, before I even thought about joining the team. In my interview to take over the cinematography beginning in season two, I figured I’d be very frank about what I would want to do, and then if I didn’t get the job, at least it would be because my ideas weren’t the direction they wanted to go. But then I actually got the job. Conceptualizing what I would bring to the show as a cinematographer, the…

On Apple TV+’s dark comedy Physical, Rose Byrne plays Sheila Rubin, a San Diego housewife approaching middle age who is caught in a crisis. As her once-idealistic college professor husband flirts with his young students and toys with the idea of running for office, Sheila feels trapped in her own life — and her body. Without an outlet to mitigate her feelings of self-hatred, she secretly binges and purges food in an effort to maintain control over her life. All that changes when she discovers, serendipitously, two booming fads: aerobics and home video equipment. Suddenly given the tools and the motivation to propel herself out of depression, Sheila embarks on a mission to become an exercise guru. Set in the early ’80s as Reaganomics began to take hold of the…

ORIGINAL 1973 Sveriges Television miniseries CURRENT 2021 HBO limited series When Ingmar Bergman’s six-episode series depicting the end of a marriage hit Swedish TV screens in 1973, it was considered so impactful that the country’s rising divorce rates were partially blamed on the portrait of a couple in crisis. (Its subsequent 167-minute theatrical version, released in the U.S. in 1974, also caused a stir when it was deemed ineligible at the 47th Academy Awards.) In 2021, a dissection of a crumbling marriage could hardly have the same effect, which for writers Hagai Levi and Amy Herzog meant looking for insight beyond the original. “Bergman was writing for a society where it was largely presumed that marriage was a positive good. We’re writing in a context where marriage has been interrogated…

The first Critics’ Choice Television Awards, held June 20, 2011, made it the new kid on the TV kudosfest block. An offshoot of the Critics’ Choice Awards, which honors movies, it was conceived to broaden the reach of the Broadcast Critics Association and muscle in on the territory of the Television Critics Association. The ceremony, hosted by Cat Deeley, was held at the Beverly Hilton and live-streamed on VH1. Two days later, an edited version aired on ReelzChannel. One of the categories was “most exciting new series,” and it featured eight honorees (Smash and Alcatraz among them) but no winners. (The category was retired in 2016.) All of that said, some very deserving awards were handed out at the first ceremony, including best drama series to Mad Men, AMC’s stylish…

If you don’t believe that awards season is a yearlong event, take a look at the television landscape. Just two months after the 2021 Emmys, the race for next year’s awards already has begun thanks to the TV Academy’s eligibility calendar, which runs from June to May. While Emmy winners like The Crown and The Queen’s Gambit are ineligible for the fall TV awards season due to their 2020 airing (while Ted Lasso’s second-season launch in July also makes it eligible for Critics Choice and SAG Awards), shows like Hacks and Mare of Easttown could pick up a second set of noms (and wins). Meanwhile, all the shows below that premiered after the May 31 cutoff have an advantage in the fall season. KEY Winner at 2021 Emmys Eligible at…

To hear Sandra Oh and Holland Taylor talk about The Chair, one might think the actresses were in a months-long race against time. “How long were we together — two months? Three months? We shot The Chair while we were sprinting,” Oh recalls during a transatlantic Zoom call with Taylor. (Oh, having just wrapped the final season of Killing Eve, was on vacation in Barcelona; Taylor was home in L.A.) “I felt like every scene began with an announcement,” says Taylor. “ ‘OK, we’ve got to get through this by 11.’ I was there thinking, ‘It’s 10:43!’ ” On the academia-set limited series, Oh plays Ji-Yoon Kim, the newly appointed (and first female) English department head at a prestigious liberal arts university. As she balances a problematic relationship with a…

ORIGINAL Isaac Asimov short stories, published 1942-50 CURRENT 2021 Apple TV+ series It took two hours for showrunner David S. Goyer to outline the thousand-year journey depicted in Isaac Asimov’s expansive book series in his pitch to Apple TV+. “Most pitches are an hour or under, but the people that were listening knew it was a huge financial, time and scheduling investment. They needed to know that the story had some legs,” says Goyer. “Also, Asimov never finished the story, so they needed to know that I at least had some vague idea of what we were writing toward.” The fact that Asimov’s multigenerational saga lacked an ending was only part of the problem many had faced in attempting to bring it to the screen. “The first novel is really…

ORIGINAL 2018 book by Beth Macy CURRENT 2021 Hulu limited series Danny Strong already had descended deep into the rabbit hole of researching America’s opioid crisis when he discovered that Fox 21 — the sister studio of 20th Television, to which he had sold a limited series script on the subject — had purchased the rights to Beth Macy’s 2018 best-seller, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company That Addicted America. “They asked if I would team up with their project, so I read the book, and I really liked it,” says Strong, who then brought Macy into the Dopesick writers room. “Beth did this incredible job of really showing the people on the ground and the victims of the opioid crisis. I really wanted to capture that spirit.” Before…

In season three of Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, anchor Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) travels to Italy for a complicated, emotional confrontation with her disgraced former co-host and lover, Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell); the scene takes place during the early days of the pandemic as the coronavirus begins its rampage across the globe. Veteran Emmy-winning editor Sidney Wolinsky — who this year received a Career Achievement Award from the American Cinema Editors — cut the episode. Wolinsky says he used wider shots when Alex first shows up at Mitch’s villa, which allowed the viewer to understand the geography. “There was actually a high shot, shooting down from the top of the gate,” he says. “I wanted to show that Steve Carell’s character was social distancing from Alex. Then you get…

FX on Hulu’s Reservation Dogs might have the most exciting cast of breakout performers of the year. Premiering in August, the darkly comic tale follows four teenagers growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma as they scheme their way — through minor crime sprees including hijacking a snack delivery truck and stealing copper — off the rez to sunny California in honor of their late friend Daniel, who aspired to head west to start anew. Leading the pack is Elora Danan, played with a quiet intensity by Devery Jacobs, who tells THR that she “needed to be part of the show” when she first heard of the project created by Oscar winner Taika Waititi and showrunner Sterlin Harjo. Told from a uniquely Native perspective, the series skewers cliches throughout its…

ORIGINAL 1998 TV Tokyo series CURRENT 2021 Netflix series When an intellectual property has fans as vocal as those of Japanese mangaturned-anime series Cowboy Bebop, being responsible for bringing its live-action version to screen comes with a bit of stress. “The phrase we used on set was, ‘This is Cowboy Bebop, let’s not fuck it up,’ ” says showrunner André Nemec with a chuckle. “We would say it in production meetings. We would say it as we were setting up camera. We would say it in postproduction. We would say it a lot.” Thankfully, for Nemec, the nerves only served as fuel to nail the feel of the original. “The anime had a poetry to it that could sucker punch you, either with a laugh or a tear that you…