Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 25B, August 15, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

In his incendiary Emmy-nominated Netflix comedy special The Closer, Dave Chappelle reminds his audience that Twitter may be an influential force, but it often reflects a distorted version of real life. Throughout the special, in which everything from the pandemic to police shootings is fair game, he jokes about the blowback he received from the LGBTQ community and their allies after a previous special where he cracked about anti-trans violence. As Chappelle makes very clear in The Closer, he doesn’t care if trans people or other detractors use social media to try to cancel him. “Twitter is not a real place,” he says. And the Television Academy apparently agrees. The Closer has earned two Emmy nominations, one for directing and one for prerecorded variety special. For the latter, Chappelle is…

OUTSTANDING STRUCTURED REALITY PROGRAM Antiques Roadshow (PBS) This staple of broadcast television, on which experts appraise items brought to them by members of the public, has been nominated for this award every year since 2005 but has yet to win. Its 18-episode 26th season, which featured a stop in Colonial Williamsburg and was shot with special COVID precautions, was not nominated for any other awards. Fixer Upper: Welcome Home (Magnolia Network) This spinoff of the HGTV franchise that was nominated in this category in 2017 and 2018 also features hosts Chip and Joanna Gaines renovating homes. Its nine episodes, which finished rolling out last August, included work on a castle in the Gaines’ hometown of Waco, Texas. It wasn’t nominated in any other category. Love Is Blind (Netflix) Dating shows…

In the final episode of The White Lotus, Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) finds her voice at last. After a fraught honeymoon with new husband Shane (Jake Lacy) — throughout which he harasses the resort manager for a room upgrade and hosts his mother (Molly Shannon) when she pops by for a brief stay — Rachel has come to the realization that she and Shane aren’t as compatible as they thought. Writer-director Mike White breaks down this tense moment between the young couple as Rachel “rips the Band-Aid off” and declares the honeymoon over. The White Lotus originated with a single storyline: that of a young couple vacationing on their honeymoon. “The idea was that one person in the couple realizes on the honeymoon that the person they’ve married isn’t exactly who…

Apple TV+’s thriller Severance is centered on a fictional company that offers employees a “severance” procedure through which their memories are surgically separated between their work and home life — meaning that when in one state, there’s no recollection of the other. Lumon Industries claims this offers a work-life balance, or a way to recover from personal trauma. But not remembering does nothing to alter an unsettling reality in either state, nor can it mitigate abuse by the employer. Establishing the disparate lives of manager Mark Scout (Adam Scott) in his “innie” (work) state and “outtie” (nonwork) state — where he is processing the death of his wife — was central to the series, which is nominated for 14 Emmys, including two for editing. “At the beginning of the series…

THE 2022 NOMINEES The five nominees were also all nominated for outstanding limited or anthology series, proving that a great cast is vital to a show’s success. DOPESICK Hulu, limited series Casting by Erica Arvold, Avy Kaufman THE DROPOUT Hulu, limited series Casting by Jeanie Bacharach, Alison Goodman, Mark Rutman INVENTING ANNA Netflix, limited series Casting by Simone Bär, Jamie Castro, Allison Estrin, Linda Lowy, Juliette Ménager, Alexandra Montag, Henry Russell Bergstein PAM & TOMMY Hulu, limited series Casting by Lindsay Graham Ahanonu, Mary Vernieu THE WHITE LOTUS HBO, anthology series Casting by Katie Doyle, Meredith Tucker 20 Years of Casting Data Here’s how the casting for a limited or anthology series or movie category has looked between 2002 and 2021 CASTING A WIDE NET Each of these casting professionals…

Bela Bajaria is a TV executive who became the first woman of color to ever run a Hollywood studio when she was appointed president of Universal Television in August 2011, a role she held until May 2016. Since November 2016, she has worked — and since 2020 has been the head of global television — at Netflix, the streaming service that is currently available in more than 190 countries, boasts more than 220 million subscribers worldwide and heads into the 74th Emmy Awards with 105 nominations, the most of any content provider save for HBO/HBO Max. Its most recognized program this year, with 14 nominations, is the Korean dramatic thriller Squid Game, which already has made history by becoming the first show not in the English language to ever land…

The ambitious fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things involved developing the look and sound of its threatening, vine-laden antagonist Vecna. Creator-showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer drew early inspiration for the character from Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series and Pinhead from the Hellraiser franchise, says Michael Maher Jr., one of three VFX supervisors from the Emmy-nominated effects team. In all, their work involved a staggering 4,400 VFX shots created by nearly 30 effects vendors including DNEG, Digital Domain, Rodeo FX, Lola and Important Looking Pirates, plus Scanline, which Netflix acquired in November. “We worked with a number of different [Vecna] designs until we whittled it to something that had a bit of the Upside Down and a bit of Dungeons & Dragons,” Maher, also a concept artist,…

Mike Prickett not only served as director of photography on 100 Foot Wave, but his own story is so uniquely intertwined with big-wave surfing that it is even depicted in episode five of the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary series. “In the world of cinematography in the ocean, Mike Prickett has been at the forefront,” says big-wave pioneer and subject of the series, Garrett McNamara, during the episode. Surf cinematographer Brock Ladd goes on to describe the DP as a “legend in the surf community.” Prickett resides on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, and has been lensing surfing for nearly four decades while compiling credits on movies including Chasing Mavericks and Step Into Liquid. Along the way, he has developed techniques and camera systems for photographing these unrepeatable moments, and has…

Sarah Paulson earned her eighth Emmy nomination this season for her portrayal of Linda Tripp on FX’s Impeachment: American Crime Story, delivering a nuanced and compelling portrait of the civil servant whose involvement in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair made her a household name after she handed over taped phone calls between herself and Monica Lewinsky (played on the limited series by Beanie Feldstein) to independent counsel Kenneth Starr — conversations in which the latter reveals her sexual affair with President Bill Clinton while she was an intern at the White House. For showrunner Sarah Burgess, who is also Emmy-nominated for outstanding writing for a limited or anthology series, Tripp was not the villain of the piece, despite her infamous betrayal of her onetime friend and former Pentagon colleague Lewinsky. “Not that…

Before Christina Ricci starred on Showtime’s Yellowjackets as Misty Quigley — an eager-to-please high school equipment manager turned crafty and cunning nurse — she made her first foray into television as a guest star on David E. Kelley’s legal dramedy Ally McBeal. Twenty years ago, Ricci appeared in seven episodes of the Fox show’s fifth and final season as Liza Bump, a cutthroat lawyer who faces off in court against the attorneys of the Cage & Fish firm and ends up marrying Greg Germann’s Richard Fish in the series finale. The actress already had a healthy film career at that point, with her iconic role as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family as well as performances in Casper, The Opposite of Sex and Sleepy Hollow. She had made an appearance on…

LUPIN (2021-PRESENT) This French mystery series follows Assane Diop (Omar Sy), who, inspired by the fictional master thief Arsène Lupin, plans a plot to avenge the death of his father, who died in prison after being framed in a jewel heist 25 years earlier. THE WITCHER (2019-PRESENT) The short stories and novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski serve as the basis for this fantasy series, which stars Henry Cavill as monster hunter Geralt of Rivia and already has spawned an animated feature and a prequel series. MONEY HEIST (2017-PRESENT) The Spanish heist crime drama, aka La Casa de Papel, debuted on a Spanish network in 2017 before Netflix acquired its global streaming rights later that year. It since has had three seasons (split up into multiple parts and volumes).…

Across Stranger Things’ four seasons, a variety of creatures have faced off against the teens of Hawkins, Indiana, all of which originated from the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down. While the first three seasons saw the Demogorgon and Mind Flayer enter the human world, the season-four villain Vecna is a departure from the Stranger Things playbook, a psychological antagonist with human origins. Creators Matt and Ross Duffer tell THR that they envisioned Vecna as something akin to the horror movie villains of their youth. “We talked about those cultural touchstones … like, why did that scare me so much?” says Ross. But the antagonist also represents the Duffers’ continued effort to keep the show fresh and leave its fans surprised, yet satisfied. “The fan response has gotten so…

There is nothing inherently funny about the fraud committed by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, but in the hands of creator Elizabeth Meriwether and director Michael Showalter, the retelling of Holmes’ rise and fall elicits more than a few chuckles. For Showalter, whose comedic background includes co-creating Wet Hot American Summer and Search Party, that dark humor was a vital part of The Dropout. “Part of what’s interesting about this story is that these people exist inside of this strange bubble that none of us really understand, where millions of dollars are being handed back and forth as if it’s no big deal,” says the director. “The stakes are strange because while, as the show continues, real people are being affected by it, there’s also a Bonfire of the Vanities situation.”…

Both Cathy Yan and Lorene Scafaria have had robust careers directing features, so getting the opportunity to helm an episode of Succession presented a new opportunity for each. Scafaria, known best for her 2019 crime drama Hustlers, had already worked in television, having directed three episodes of the Fox comedy New Girl, but she saw Succession as a dream job largely because it’s one of her favorite shows of all time. Yan, who helmed the 2020 superhero film Birds of Prey, had never directed TV, but she also considers herself a huge fan of Jesse Armstrong’s HBO drama. Yan directed “The Disruption,” the third episode of the Emmy-nominated third season that reintroduces the cast to the larger world after a mostly isolated first two hours spent scrambling in the aftermath…