Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 23B, August 12, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

Netflix’s historical drama The Crown, created and written by Peter Morgan, has received its fair share of critiques and critical acclaim, including 18 Emmy nominations for its sixth and final season. Yet the one group of individuals who haven’t publicly voiced their opinion are the subject of the show itself: the royal family. “I’ve heard that they love it, I’ve heard that they hate it, I’ve heard everything,” Morgan tells THR. “I’ve decided that until one of the members of the royal family tells me directly, in person, I won’t believe anything that I hear.” Here, the showrunner talks about the difficulty of executing a prestige television show for six years and why there are still royal stories he might want to tell. What did making six seasons of this…

In its third season, The Morning Show introduced an Elon Musk-inspired tech billionaire, a Jan. 6 insurrection story line and multiple backstabby corporate takeover plots. But the point of all that high-stakes drama — on one of TV’s most gleefully over-the-top shows — is to remind us all to be a little more humble. So says Michael Ellenberg, executive producer of the Apple TV+ hit, who spoke THR on the occasion of The Morning Show’s 16 Emmy nominations about how the series managed to tackle heavy storylines without taking itself too seriously and why it’s more fun to make a TV show without a multiseason master plan. How did The Morning Show hit its stride in season three? The show is still exploring its core themes—what does it mean to…

It’s been described as “the show where Gary Oldman farts.” At least that’s what showrunner Will Smith tells THR about his Apple TV+ series Slow Horses. The spy thriller that’s got more than a sprinkle of wry, acidulous humor was nominated for nine Emmys this year, including outstanding drama series and outstanding lead actor for the venerated Oldman. Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, a crotchety and bedraggled MI5 agent in charge of a collection of rejected and disgraced agents operating out of Slough House, a division of the U.K. security agency for lost toys. The series is based on the popular collection of books by novelist Mick Herron, with each season following a single installment. Through three seasons, with a fourth set to drop Sept. 4, Slow Horses has amassed a…

For Palm Royale makeup and hair department heads Tricia Sawyer and Karen Bartek, Slim Aarons’ 1960s photography served as the biggest inspiration for nailing the looks of a cast that includes Kristen Wiig, Allison Janney, Laura Dern, Carol Burnett, Ricky Martin and Leslie Bibb. “Aarons really captured the essence of Palm Beach in that time period,” Sawyer tells THR. “He has several books that I referred to daily. There are also some videos online of Palm Beach society women of the period that were helpful.” Palm Royale follows Wiig’s Maxine Dellacorte-Simmons, an outsider who strives to attain a place in Palm Beach’s high society. Almost every actor in the series, which has been renewed for a second season, references the hair or makeup of a famous actress or icon of…

Before The Morning Show became an Emmy contender (with 16 nominations for its current third season, including outstanding drama series), The Newsroom garnered the TV Academy’s attention by examining the fast-paced world of primetime cable news. The Aaron Sorkin show, which ran on HBO for three seasons starting in 2012, took a West Wing type approach to TV journalism, presenting the challenge of covering real-life stories from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the Boston Marathon bombing. Jeff Daniels led the cast as Will McAvoy, anchor of the fictional evening news program News Night, whose crew — played by the likes of Emily Mortimer, Sam Waterston and Olivia Munn — are on a mission to cover the news smartly and objectively, ratings be damned. McAvoy sets the tone for the…

HBO’s docuseries Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A. tells the history of renowned Memphis record label Stax Records, shining a light on the widespread industry racism that Stax and its groundbreaking musical roster — including Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes and Booker T. & The M.G.’s — endured on their path to becoming music legends. Sophia Dilley runs Concord Originals, which develops material from Concord’s expansive music catalog for film and television. “I had met with Michelle Smith, who oversees the legacy and brand of Stax Records for Concord,” Dilley explains. “She came into my office and said, ‘I have to tell you, this is one of the most important stories under our roof, and we need to tell it.’ ” Watching the four-part series, directed by Jamila Wignot, it’s easy to understand Smith’s…

When Donald Glover announced he was remaking the feature action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith as an Amazon Prime series, few in the industry probably had this finished product on their bingo cards. Part meditation on relationships, part case-of-the-week showpiece for a who’s who of guest stars (see: Parker Posey, John Turturro and Michaela Coel, to name a few), the drama that Glover and co-creator/showrunner Francesca Sloane crafted bears no resemblance to its predecessor. That, it turns out, was their plan all along — and something they’ll only be doubling down on now that the show has earned 16 Emmy nominations and a second season. If you had to distill what you were trying to say with the first season in one scene, which would it be? It doesn’t have to…

As production designer on The Gentlemen, Martyn John’s first job was to find the right house. The Guy Ritchie Netflix series, a spinoff of his 2019 action comedy feature of the same name, is centered on the ridiculously posh English manor owned by the Hornimans, a blueblooded group of British aristocrats with a dirty secret: They’re getting paid by a drug baron, who is using their land to grow vast amounts of marijuana. Theo James stars as Eddie Horniman, new duke of the manor, who takes over after his father dies and in the process learns about his predecessor’s nefarious business dealings. “When I got the job, I knew I had to find something a bit like Downton Abbey, where the house becomes another character in the show,” says John.…

The use of Italian painter Caravaggio’s work in Netflix’s limited series Ripley, nominated for 13 Emmys, was no coincidence. The black-and-white show played heavily on light and shadow, something that the artist, known as “The Master of Light,” explored in his work. “Steve [Zaillian, showrunner] wanted to emphasize the play of light and shadow, not just in the world but also on people’s faces — the emotional reason why things wanted to [be felt] in monochrome,” says the show’s cinematographer, Robert Elswit, whose credits include Boogie Nights and The Night Of. Elswit played with such contrast even further when showing the series’ main character, con man Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott), walking around churches in Italy. Churches, says Elswit, emit light through windows or from minimal overhead light fixtures, therefore casting…

The big question hanging over Netflix’s 3 Body Problem when it premiered in April was: Can the creators of HBO’s Game of Thrones do it again? Thrones was the most Emmy-winning drama of all time, and showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss — who tackled the adaptation of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem along with Alexander Woo — had the incredibly uncommon fortune of scoring outstanding drama series noms for all eight seasons of their one and only previous TV show. Then, in July, came the news — as if the show’s critical acclaim and popularity weren’t enough — that they had done it again by scoring a nom in the Emmy drama series category (along with five other nods) for the debut season of their bold scifi adaptation. “It…

Leave it to Julian Fellowes, the man who made his career mining the aristocracy, to eke a season’s worth of narrative tension out of dueling opera houses. That’s what the Gilded Age creator did during the second run of his HBO series, which chronicled a heavily fictionalized war of the old-money-backed Academy of Music and the new-money alternative, the Metropolitan Opera. (Name recognition alone should give you a hint how that turned out.) But, for the Emmy-winning writer of Downton Abbey, the debate about opera allegiances is ultimately symbolic. “These new people, they were juggernauts,” he says. “They knocked down everything in their path. In many ways, it was the preamble to the 21st century, the American Century.” “Opera wars” isn’t an obvious arc for a pricey period drama. What…

At first glance, it’s hard to see what exactly the VFX team working on “Dis-Moi Oui,” the third episode of the sixth and final season of The Crown, is nominated for in the Emmys’ outstanding visual effects category. “Well, that’s good,” says Ben Turner, visual effects supervisor for the series. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Turner worked on The Crown since the start, but the episode depicting the death of Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) is one that stands out to him, not only for its emotional stakes but for the scope of the work itself. “In the latest [season], a lot of our work went into the Diana and Dodi [Khalid Abdalla] love story,” says Turner. “In episode three, our flagship episode, a lot of our work was in…

Baby Reindeer editor Peter Oliver believes the 11-time Emmy-nominated limited series’ pacing is one of the reasons the dark comedy thriller works so well. However, he won’t take full credit for that. The show’s harrowing fourth episode is the one that has secured Oliver his first-time nod, an honor he shares with Benjamin Gerstein. “I originally tried to make it more frenetic so it felt more jump-cut-y, but the director Weronika Tofilska slowed that right down,” he explains, agreeing it was the right thing to do. For mood and tone, one of the stylistic references she gave Oliver early on was Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting. While the Netflix seven-parter predominantly focuses on Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd) being stalked by Martha Scott (Jessica Gunning), a lawyer with a checkered past,…