Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 23A, August 8, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

Recently, I was honored to have Vice President Kamala Harris visit the Werk Room of RuPaul’s Drag Race. She was engaging, informed and an inspiration to all of us. She also made “herstory” as the first presidential candidate to fully embrace the power of drag queens to promote voter registration. Drag queens have always been on the front lines of the battle for LGBTQIA social justice. From Stonewall to the AIDS crisis to marriage equality and beyond, drag queens have thrown bricks, raised millions of dollars and galvanized the queer community to take action. As a gay television producer, I am forever grateful for those who came before us. The brave souls put their own lives on the line, fought for equality and helped create a world in which a…

In Abbott Elementary’s third season, series creator Quinta Brunson and her writers room were handed a challenge: Tell a thorough, engrossing story in eight fewer episodes than usual. The ABC comedy, which typically runs 22 half-hour blocks, was truncated as a result of the writers and actors strikes (the February premiere timing also conflicted with the series’ history of following the school year in real time). “I knew right away I didn’t want to hold anything for season four, and that I wanted to protect the finale ending we had planned,” says Brunson. She used the opportunity to try out a time jump for the first time — among other creative pivots — and the result garnered Abbott nine Emmy nominations, including outstanding comedy series. “The season had a different…

When season three of Hacks premiered May 2, it had been two years since a new episode dropped on Max. The hiatus wasn’t an unprecedented length — Severance, anyone? — but it presented a potential challenge to the showrunners: how to elevate the season enough to recapture viewers’ attention while staying true to the heart of the show. But according to the trio behind Hacks (longtime comedy partners Jen Statsky, Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello), they knew during production that they were clearing the hurdle. “One of the people who is a great barometer for us is Jean Smart, since she’s been working so prolifically for so long,” says Downs. “So when she says to us, ‘This is the best episode we’ve ever done,’ it’s just, wow.” Adds Aniello:…

Over its first two seasons as one of the most critically hailed shows on TV, Reservation Dogs collected just one Emmy nomination. Yet it broke through in a bigger way in its third and final season with four nominations, including one for best comedy series. Co-creator and showrunner Sterlin Harjo talks with THR about the show’s closing season and choosing the right time to end. You caught a lot of people by surprise when it was announced that season three would be the last one. What was the process of deciding to end the story where you did? This is a show that is centered around grief and community grieving, coming to terms with loss. That’s not a giant plot. And I think that to respect an audience — it…

Child actors being pushed on set for ratings and box office success long has been the foundation of Hollywood, as they become the fresh faces of film, TV tentpole franchises and indie gems. But Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV co-directors and executive producers Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz spotted a fatal flaw in the production of kids TV series and the direction of child stars with their Investigation Discovery docu-series that focused on toxic environment claims around popular Nickelodeon shows run by prolific producer Dan Schneider. Former Nickelodeon actors had allegedly been left unprotected and vulnerable to on-set racism, exploitation and sexual abuse at very young ages. For Robertson, the success of the Quiet on Set series should help lay the groundwork for more equitable and…

Filmmaking couple Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss first discovered the Girls and Boys State programs, which see teenagers building mock governments over a weeklong period, when boys in the 2017 Texas program voted to secede from the U.S. “That was their gesture of rebellion, and it seemed characteristic of Trump’s election and the general state of the country,” says Moss. Because of that secession decision, Boys State became the first of two companion documentaries the couple would make focused on teenagers in the program. The filmmakers always knew they’d want to focus on the girls’ side of things as well: “We are parents to two teenage girls, so there was a certain personal piece to making this film,” explains McBaine. One issue that cropped up in both films was the…

While a lot of the online discourse surrounding this year’s Emmy contenders seems heavily focused on — perhaps even obsessed with — litigating The Bear’s status as a comedy series, it hasn’t stopped the FX series from dominating the nominations in the category. Season two, which dropped more a year ago, follows chefs Carmy and Sydney as they push to flip the long-standing beef sandwich shop into a high-end, Michelin-star-hopeful restaurant. Stars (and last year’s winners) Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy Allen White and Ebon Moss-Bachrach received repeat nods, as did Jon Bernthal, with Lionel Boyce and Liza Colón-Zayas picking up first-time noms. The voting body seems particularly enamored with the flashback episode “Fishes,” which gave viewers an illuminating peek into one overwhelming, climactic, oftentimes depressingly tragic Berzatto family Christmas — it…

Only Murders in the Building, which John Hoffman created with Steve Martin, received 21 Emmy noms this year, including one for best comedy series — a feat Hoffman, a four-time Emmy winner, tells THR is “affirming.” How did the story at the center of season three come together? For me to have any confidence in leading a writers room and building a season of a show like this with a cast like this, I have to feel I know this story in my bones. I based Oliver [Martin Short’s character] on an old theater professor of mine I was very close with until he passed away, Dr. Richard Mason — he was known as “The Mayor of Charles Street” down in Greenwich Village. The pursuit of a theatrical endeavor through…

After five seasons of FX’s What We Do in the Shadows, showrunner Paul Simms can finally admit he doesn’t care much about vampires, really — and that’s what makes the comedy on his show timeless and universal. “It all goes back to the basic things: different people having different goals that bring them into conflict with each other,” says Simms of the series in which a group of bloodsuckers descend upon modern-day Staten Island to take over the New World — only to find themselves unable to accomplish their mission, thanks to their collective idiocy. Despite the supernatural backdrop (and the occasional gore, amped to comic levels), What We Do in the Shadows is grounded by its defining sitcom quality: a group of hilarious misfits navigating their world, one blunder…

Nearly 60 years before FX’s comedy What We Do in the Shadows earned its third Emmy nom for best comedy series, the ABC soap opera Dark Shadows brought supernatural storylines featuring vampires, ghosts, werewolves and witches to TV — albeit with less overtly comic qualities — when it premiered in June 1966. Filled with melodramatic plot twists, the campy soap set in the fictional Collinsport, Maine, quickly became a hit with teenagers (the late afternoon airtime was perfect for post-school TV watching) and maintained a cult following long after its cancellation in 1971 after 1,225 episodes. The series is best known for the central character of Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), a vampire whose release from a near-200-year imprisonment 10 months into the first season gave Dark Shadows a major boost…

Francesca Sloane, writer and co-creator of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, worked with Donald Glover to reinterpret the 2005 film of the same name into a dark dramedy about two for-hire agents embroiled in a tumultuous fake marriage. Sloane selected this scene from episode six, “Couples Therapy,” where John and Jane Smith (Glover and Maya Erskine) break into a scathing fight while on a spy mission in the woods, and tensions that have been simmering over the course of the season come to a head.…

Curb Your Enthusiasm ended with a trial and a kicker that put what its creative team called a “stubborn exclamation point” on the Larry David-created series, on which he also stars, by revisiting and flipping the ending of Seinfeld for Curb’s final episode. The series ender for the long-running HBO comedy closed with a classic callback to the Jerry Seinfeld-led series that David co-created and ran years earlier. His Curb partner, showrunner Jeff Schaffer, points out that the plot was more than two decades in the making. “It’s just cool that you can hang around long enough to be able to do a 26-year-old joke,” says Schaffer. While Curb, which has received four Emmy noms for its final season, is over, Schaffer says David hasn’t stopped being perturbed by the…

Abe Sylvia, the creator of Apple TV+’s Palm Royale, had for years been trying to make a show that takes place in Palm Beach, and he finally cracked it with the Kristen Wiig-led comedy series about a woman who strives, and will do anything, to be a part of high society in the exclusive community. The writing, the star-studded cast (including Carol Burnett, Allison Janney, Laura Dern and Ricky Martin) and the vibrant production and costume design all helped the show resonate with Academy voters, who awarded the series 10 Emmy nominations, including best comedy. Below, Sylvia talks filming in Los Angeles, how the script was tailored when Burnett came on board and why multiple seasons were always the endgame. Talk to me about the conception of the show, originally…

In the Netflix documentary The Greatest Night in Pop, tensions are high as more than 40 of the top musicians of the ’80s, including Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross and Cyndi Lauper, only have a few late night hours to record the anthem “We Are the World.” The tension is so palpable that it was still present decades later at the January premiere of the documentary, recalls Lionel Richie, who co-wrote the song with Michael Jackson and was a producer on the doc. “When we did the premiere, Huey Lewis was sitting with me, and he leaned over to me and said, ‘I don’t think we’re going to make it.’ And I said, ‘Huey, it was 40 years ago. We made it,’” Richie says, laughing. The song…