Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 24A, August 4, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

It all started with a pitch I received about Theranos in late 2013. As a correspondent at ABC News, I was working on a series with Diane Sawyer about exploding medical costs, and we were looking for solutions for our viewers. Theranos was pitched to me as a company that was creating something that could save our viewers money on blood testing: a full range of tests completed from a single drop of blood. When I started looking into it, there was no one independent who could really corroborate for me what I was being told. It didn’t seem like a gigantic red flag at this point, but it was in the back of my mind. Suddenly, I started to see Elizabeth Holmes blowing up on the cover of magazines,…

In the final episode of Netflix’s limited series Maid, protagonist Alex (Emmy nominee Margaret Qualley) confronts her mother, Paula (Qualley’s real-life mom, Andie MacDowell), who is homeless and in the throes of a mental health crisis. In this scene, Alex follows her mother to Walmart, where she discovers Paula is living out of her car. Emmy-nominated creator Molly Smith Metzler breaks down the tough, emotional scene between mother and daughter.…

Whenever Larry David finishes up with a season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the creator and star of the HBO comedy feels like he’s out of ideas. It’s always the last season — until it isn’t. But with season eleven, which aired in the fall of 2021 and nabbed four Emmys including best comedy, it really was almost the end for Larry (the character David plays on the show). “If this is how we go, this is how we go!” Jeff Schaffer, executive producer and David’s longtime collaborator, recalls saying to the crew, revealing they filmed an alternate finale scene portraying Larry’s comical death that could have functioned as a series ender. After an elaborately funny season revolving around Larry’s faux political aspirations, all in service of weaseling his way out…

Even after the intricate behind-the-scenes planning — from crafting an appropriately dense and twisty murder mystery to mapping out character arcs and dynamics for stars Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez that were complex and funny — that went into Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, showrunner John Hoffman recognized that he must remain on the lookout for in-the-moment inspiration. He recalls pitching Martin, 75, a bit of challenging physical comedy in the 10th episode of the debut season. With an expectation that there might be limits to his enthusiasm, he was surprised and delighted when his series cocreator immediately declared he was all in, offering a fresh blast of ideas for additional flourishes, in the same vein as the sublimely manic bits of business that distinguished his earliest…

This Emmy season was stuffed with true-crime sagas, largely among the limited/anthology series. With that category’s top prize restricted to just five nominees, four of the series noms went to titles that examined high-profile crimes: Hulu’s Dopesick, The Dropout and Pam & Tommy, plus Netflix’s Inventing Anna. While fraud is at the center of each of these series, the more traditional “true-crime” shows — with murders driving the narratives — were less popular with TV Academy voters. HBO’s The Staircase, about the infamous case in which crime novelist Michael Peterson’s wife was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their North Carolina home, earned nods for lead actors Colin Firth and Toni Collette; FX/Hulu’s Under the Banner of Heaven, about the grisly death of a young mother and…

LIMITED / ANTHOLOGY SERIES Dopesick (Hulu) Danny Strong’s sobering and kaleidoscopic look at the opioid crisis landed 14 nominations, including directing, writing and six for acting, and can boast a certain social import that its competitors cannot. It already won a Peabody Award and a SAG Award for Michael Keaton, who as Dr. Samuel Finnix looks unstoppable in the lead-actor-in-a-limited-series race. The Dropout (Hulu) Elizabeth Meriwether’s show about Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes (played by Amanda Seyfried) rolled out more recently than any of its competitors (March-April 2022) and is tied for the highest Rotten Tomatoes score of the lot (89 percent). Its six nominations include two for directing and one for writing, but it earned just one acting nom (for Seyfried). Inventing Anna (Netflix) Another ripped-from-the-headlines entry is…

Quinta Brunson has earned three Emmy nominations for Abbott Elementary — one as an executive producer on the show, one for writing its pilot and one for her lead performance as Janine, an idealistic and ambitious young teacher at a Philadelphia elementary school. The ABC sitcom is the only network show to earn a series nomination — it also earned nods for supporting actors Janelle James, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Tyler James Williams — and was a breakout hit last season thanks to its sharp humor and endearing ensemble cast. Brunson spoke with THR about how she developed the workplace comedy, how she always conceived it as a network series and how she folds real-life topics into the show’s storylines. Did you feel, from the beginning, that your show would…

When Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky were working together on Broad City, awards were outside their grasp. “It was so not in our world,” says Downs, who would come to expect the same until their latest collaboration, HBO Max’s Hacks, scored 15 Emmy nominations (and three wins) for its first season. “It was shocking,” recounts Aniello, who’s married to Downs. When the comedy series, starring Jean Smart as aging comic Deborah Vance and Hannah Einbinder as her millennial writer Ava, returned for a second season this spring, the writing trio felt pressure to deliver something that was at least as good as season one. “But none of us ever expected to get more nominations [17 in total], and so weirdly it was able to shock us again,”…

Spoiler alert for season three of Ted Lasso: There won’t be mass casualties. “It’s not like Thanos is in it and half of us die,” co-creator, executive producer and actor Brendan Hunt jokes to THR about the show’s third and possibly — as widely speculated — final season. “Most of us, anyway, will probably still be alive.” Hunt spoke with THR from London, where production on season three is winding down, about the Apple TV+ series’ repeat and new Emmy nominations, criticisms of season two and what’s to come for the series. Congratulations on the repeat best comedy series nomination. I have to imagine it’s gratifying to see some other castmembers get nominated this year, along with the people repeating. They’re all gratifying, but it’s really cool that so many…

Audiences clearly get a kick out of Ted Lasso, the Apple TV+ series that picked up 20 Emmy nominations this year to match its 2021 mark and again lead the comedy pack. But this isn’t the first comedic series to score with viewers and voters alike by focusing on a coach who succeeds against the odds. While Jason Sudeikis’ Lasso is an American college football coach who ventures into the world of English soccer, Craig T. Nelson starred on ABC’s Coach as Hayden Fox, a gruff leader tasked with guiding his football players at fictional Minnesota State — while eventually bonding with assistants Luther (Jerry Van Dyke) and Dauber (Bill Fagerbakke), getting to know estranged adult daughter Kelly (Clare Carey) and falling in love with TV news anchor Christine (Shelley…

José Andrés is one of the world’s greatest chefs and humanitarians. Spanish-born and American-naturalized, he opened his first restaurant in the U.S., Jaleo, 29 years ago, and now oversees the Think Food Group, an empire of dozens of restaurants including minibar and The Bazaar. The only chef to have received two Michelin stars and four Bib Gourmand awards, he was named Bon Appetit’s chef of the year in 2004 and the James Beard Foundation’s outstanding chef of 2011, and in 2010, he became the first chef to receive Spain’s prestigious Order of Arts and Letters medallion in recognition of his efforts to showcase Spanish culture abroad. As another celebrity chef, Emeril Lagasse, put it, “He is a brilliant restaurateur who has shaped America’s culinary history and course by introducing his…

Bill Hader, the multihyphenate star of Barry — who has earned two Emmys for his leading role and this year earned a third acting nomination as well as nods for writing and directing on the series — doesn’t get too hung up on whether his show is still a comedy. Yes, the show is classified as such, and his Emmy-nominated co-stars Anthony Carrigan and Henry Winkler respectively deliver delightfully comic performances as Chechen mobster NoHo Hank and washed-up acting teacher Gene Cousineau. But the show, which follows the eponymous hitman as he balances a life of crime with his aspirations to make it in Hollywood (and live a normal life with his girlfriend, Sally, played by Sarah Goldberg, who also has dreams of stardom), has always balanced dark themes with…

If it hadn’t been for the global pandemic, the fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel would likely have arrived in radically different form: As in previous seasons, Midge and the Maisel intimates would have ventured around the country, might have toe-dipped into ever-broader showbiz platforms. As always, the sky was the limit. But as COVID-19 made its presence known, married co-creators/showrunners Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino found themselves reconfiguring their plans to meet the moment. The resulting season — thanks in large part to their longtime practice of letting story, character and actor strengths lead them — garnered 12 Emmy nominations. The season saw Midge’s successes and struggles pushing her stand-up comedy career forward. The supporting players — father Abe, manager Susie and ex-husband Joel — found their own…

FX’s What We Do in the Shadows might be the bloodiest sitcom on television. A trio of ancient vampires — Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry) and his wife, Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) — bunk together in a spooky Staten Island manse with an annoying pedant who feeds off others’ energy (Colin Robinson, the energy vampire played by Mark Proksch) and their human familiar (Harvey Guillén as Guillermo de la Cruz). The vampires have lived here for more than a century, yet the bumblers have yet to fulfill the mission they set out to achieve upon their arrival from the Old World: to take over America and turn its citizens into bloodsuckers. Showrunners Paul Simms and Stefani Robinson spoke to THR about the Emmy-nominated third season of the…