Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 18A - June 13, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

Early in production on season one of Love on the Spectrum in the U.S., we were filming at Abbey’s house in L.A. Abbey (we use only first names on the show), an autistic woman living at home with her mom, Christine, was 23 at the time, and Christine was talking to me about some of her fears for Abbey’s future, when she as a mom may not be around anymore. She pictured Abbey being seen by others as a weird, “crazy” lady — walking along talking to herself, singing loudly in public, someone people would cross the street to avoid. Her concerns that people wouldn’t understand her uniqueness are valid; we live in a society where we tend to turn away from, avoid and judge without basis what we don’t…

We Were the Lucky Ones wasn’t just years in the making for director and executive producer Thomas Kail — it was a matter of decades. He met author Georgia Hunter — whose novel inspired the Hulu series about a Jewish family determined to reunite after being separated during World War II — in 1999, around the same time she began learning about her family’s history. Before Hunter even had a notion to put the Kurc family’s Holocaust survival story on paper, Kail had already heard many of the real-life accounts. The stories stuck with him after the book’s release in 2017, and several years later, Kail took his idea of bringing the “beautiful story” to the small screen to Hunter and creator Erica Lipez. Their initial adaptation pitch failed, Kail…

When Lulu Wang read Janice Y.K. Lee’s best-selling novel The Expatriates, she immediately knew she wanted to explore the periphery of the titular characters’ “bubble” in her limited series adaptation for Prime Video: “We had to step outside and see them through other lenses in order to understand the context.” With the blessing of Lee (who was in her writers room) and star/executive producer Nicole Kidman, Wang departs from the main narrative — which depicts an expat community in turmoil after one of their children goes missing — in Expats’ penultimate installment. “Grief can often be very selfish and isolating,” she explains. “I wanted the audience to experience all those things before going, ‘Wait, there’s so much more out there.’” The episode’s opening sequence establishes that purpose right away. “It…

Karen Pittman always looked for the humorous moments in having to juggle simultaneous shoots, on opposite coasts, for And Just Like That and The Morning Show, flying back and forth two to three times a month. One was using the time during the first-class flight from New York to Los Angeles to take out the braids that were a trademark of her character Dr. Nya Wallace on the Sex and the City sequel. Walking onto the two sets was always a “pinch-me moment” for Pittman, who, to borrow a well-worn expression, has arrived. After making her Broadway debut in Disgraced more than a decade ago, she landed guest roles on shows like Madame Secretary, The Good Wife and The Blacklist. She then nabbed a recurring role in two seasons of…

It was a moment Star Wars fans had been waiting for: the reunion of Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and her former master, Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen). Who better to direct that episode of Ahsoka than Dave Filoni, who created the title character (alongside George Lucas) for the animated series The Clone Wars? For Filoni, who also wrote the episode, it was crucial to find a way to please longtime fans while also educating new viewers. “[Bringing Anakin back] was something to give context to the character of Ahsoka,” says Filoni. “If you had never seen The Clone Wars, how do I give you that context? Having her confront her mentor — for the average person tuning in to understand that her mentor was Darth Vader, which is a very big…

It’s never over until it’s over. And Curb Your Enthusiasm has famously made its own TV comeback. But for co-star Susie Essman, the season 12 finale felt like the end of the series. “It was such an amazing ending,” she told THR soon after that episode aired. “Just perfect. It wrapped up the whole series in a beautiful way.” The Emmy-winning HBO comedy created by star Larry David wrapped in April after 12 seasons and more than 20 years, and the top-secret series finale was long in the making. The comedy gem signed off with a classic callback to the Seinfeld series finale (which aired in 1998), effectively putting what executive producer Jeff Schaffer called a “stubborn exclamation point” on all of David’s work to finally tell his naysayers that…

The penultimate episode of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans sees Babe Paley, the New York high-society socialite played by Naomi Watts, succumb to cancer and take her dying breath on her bed, estranged from friend Truman Capote (Tom Hollander). The shot of Paley’s death is a rare moment of inertness for the show, a deliberate decision from episode seven’s (titled “Beautiful Babe”) director Jennifer Lynch. “It’s such a pivotal moment in the show,” she says. “There was so much in the series that had movement, elegance, a flair and a pace. What I really wanted to capture in Babe dying was the stillness, that the only thing moving in that room was her breath and that she was tiny in that large bed.” Lynch insisted the camera remain still: “There…