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BROAD MINDED

Lifetime wants women to run the show JOHN LEGEND’S JOURNEY TO JUSTICE

MAN OF THE HOUR

Corey Hawkins leaps into 24: Legacy, the latest in the fast-paced franchise that took Fox to lofty heights

The Union Leader Who Feels Your Pain

welcome

I would like to thank my predecessor, Bruce Rosenblum, and the xecutive committee and board of governors, whose tremendous ork has positioned the Academy to move forward with optimism d confidence.

When I broke into this industry several decades ago, I took whatb I could: bookkeeper, videographer, grip, craft services person — o get my foot in the door. It never occurred to me that I would be where I am today, a veteran producer-director. Not only because I was a young man trying to break into a challenging business, but a young man of color.

That’s why, now that I’m here, I want to ensure that the interests of all Academy members are being considered — by championing events that are informative and relevant while continuing to address the evolving state of television.

Technology continues to move our industry forward at an incredible pace, and companies like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have irreversibly changed the landscape. While these developments were initially met with some anxiety, they have led to new job opportunities at all levels. And today more of our content is being viewed by more people, in more countries, on more distribution platforms than ever.

In this fast-moving medium, we can’t settle for the status quo. We must work toward future successes by listening, collaborating and building consensus. And just as we honor excellence with the Emmy Award, we must dedicate ourselves to excellence in every aspect of our organization.

Change isn’t easy, but it’s necessary to remain relevant. Case in point: in 2003, I received my first Emmy in a category that didn’t exist until that year, when The Amazing Race became the first winner for outstanding reality competition series. Today, of course, new genres and formats require our consideration, as reality programming did back then.

Such action will take leadership. And leadership requires vision — a vision bolstered by positive professional relationships, hands-on experience and the input of all stakeholders. These tenets have served me well in my career, and I am confident they will in my efforts as your chairman.

My other priorities include reinforcing the bond between the Academy and the Academy Foundation, an unrivaled incubator for future industry pros and an essential resource for the preservation of television history. I also want to take advantage of our new Saban Media Center and reinvigorated campus to bring together our entire television community. Imagine, for instance, TED–style talks, hosted by the Academy.

And, of course, I remain deeply committed to the expansion of diversity at all levels of our industry. I will continue to focus on the initiatives of the Academy’s diversity committee, but more broadly, we must celebrate diversity in everything we do.

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with our new executive committee, governors and the membership at large to embrace an agenda of inclusion and relevance, and I look forward to providing updates on our progress in the months ahead.

Creative Direction & Design: Bleiweiss Design Photo Direction: Rose Cefalu Head of Advertising & Business Development: Rose Einstein (323) 842-2142 einstein@televisionacademy.com Founding Publisher: Hank Rieger Editorial Adviser: Russ Patrick Television Academy President and COO: Maury McIntyre CFO and Executive Vice-President, Business Operations: Heather Cochran Senior Vice-President, Awards: John Leverence Senior Vice-President, Media & Brand Management: Susan Spencer Vice-President, Awards: Julie Shore Vice-President, Event Production: Barb Held Vice-President, Marketing: Laurel Whitcomb Public Relations Representation: breakwhitelight Legal Counsel: Alan J. Epstein, Esq., and Jeffrey S. Tenenbaum, Esq., Venable LLP Digital Digital Content Producer: Melissa Byers Video Producer: Angel Thompson Senior Web Developer: Erwin Yuson Leadership Chairman: Hayma Washington Vice-chair: Frank Scherma Second vice-chair: Steve Venezia, C.A.S. Vice-chair, L.A. Area: Mitch Waldow Secretary: Susan Nessanbaum-Goldberg Treasurer: Allison Binder Board of Governors: Eric Anderson, Eva Basler, Stuart Bass, A.C.E., Gary Baum, Ted Biaselli, Bob Boden, Sue Bub, Paul Button, Tony Carey, Barbara Cassel, Mark Cendrowski, James Pearse Connelly, Shari Cookson, Jill Daniels, Patrika Darbo, Janet Dimon, Daniel Evans, III, Ed Fassl, Tim Gibbons, Tammy Glover, Peter Golden, C.S.A., Tammy Golihew, Beatriz Gomez, Terry Ann Gordon, Monte C. Haught, Kieran Healy, Erik Henry, Regina Y. Hicks, Eileen Horta, Tana Nugent Jamieson, Marc Johnson, Lynda Kahn, Steven Kent, Norman T. Leavitt, Michael A. Levine, Sam Linsky, Gail Mancuso, Nicole Marostica, Howard Meltzer, C.S.A., Rickey Minor, Dorenda Moore, Frank Morrone, Janet Carol Norton, John O’Brien, Brian O’Rourke, Lowell Peterson, A.S.C., Michael Ruscio, A.C.E., Philip Segal, Seth Shapiro, Mark Spatny, Lily Tomlin, Ann Leslie Uzdavinis, Lois Vossen, Hayma Washington, Thom Williams, Terence Winter, Elizabeth York Executive Committee: Hayma Washington, chairman; Allison Binder, Jill Daniels, Madeline Di Nonno, Gail Mancuso, Rickey Minor, Susan Nessanbaum-Goldberg, Frank Scherma, Mark Spatny, Steve Venezia, C.A.S., Mitch Waldow; Dick Askin and Thomas W. Sarnoff, consultants to the chairman

Hayma Washington Chairman and CEO Television Academy

when The Amazing Race became the first I was thrilled to receive my first Emmy in 2003, Here I am in 2009, when we won the category winner of outstanding reality competition series. with Jerry Bruckheimer (seated), Bertram van ), winners e ten-tim (we’re time seventh the for the rest of our producing team.

Munster and Elise Doganieri (next to Jerry), and

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Editor-in-Chief: Juan Morales Editor: Gail Polevoi Contributing Editor: Kathleen O’Steen Associate Editor: Sarah Hirsch

Volume XXXIX, Issue #1, 2017, emmy ® (USPS 461-570, ISSN 0164-3495) is published by the Television Academy. The bylined articles in emmy represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of emmy, the Television Academy or its members. Editorial and business offices: 5220 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601-3109. Phone: (818) 754-2800; fax: (818) 761-2827; email: emmymagazine@televisionacademy. com; TelevisionAcademy.com. A nonmember subscription costs $37 per year (10 issues) in the U.S. (California state periodicals tax included); $53, Canada; and $78, overseas airmail (U.S. dollars only). Periodicals postage paid at North Hollywood, CA, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to emmy at 5220 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601-3109.

Emmy is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts. Emmy is the registered mark of the Television Academy (the publisher of this magazine) and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Contents ©2017 Television Academy.

RON RINALDI; CHARLES BUSH

honored and humbled to serve as chairman and O of the Television Academy for the next two years. is indeed a privilege, and I am sincerely grateful.

THE MAGAZINE OF THE TELEVISION ACADEMY televisionacademy.com

FOX, TM & Š 2017 FOX and its related entities. All Rights Reserved.

contents emmy® The Magazine of the Television Academy Volume XXXIX, Number 1

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Departments 2 WELCOME From the chairman

Features

24 Liberating a Legend Corey Hawkins breaks into hyper-hero mode in 24: Legacy, the newest installment of the prized Fox franchise that sent Kiefer Sutherland to lofty heights.

By Tatiana Siegel Photographs by Andrew Eccles for Walter Schupfer Management 32 Braking for Broads With its Broad Focus initiative, Lifetime proves it wants women running the shows.

“Women don’t need another internship,” says the exec who started it all. “They need work.”

By Lisa Rosen Photographs by Elisabeth Caren 38 Poetic Justice As an actor-producer, musician John Legend turns to television to tell a tale of courage.

By Graham Flashner Photograph by Steve Schofield 4 EMMY

40 Top Swap TV distribution goes topsy-turvy as traditional service providers encourage cord-cutting while the digital upstarts start bundling.

By Daniel Frankel Photoillustration by Todd Reublin 44 Running on Empathy The personal touch comes naturally to SAG-AFTRA president Gabrielle Carteris as she works to improve the lives of union members.

By Craig Tomashoff Photographs by Rocco Ceselin

Subscribe to

6 IN THE MIX BIO PICK: director Tricia Brock; writerproducer Vernon Chatman; performers Jenna Coleman, Dulé Hill and Brooklyn Sudano; choreographer Fred Tallaksen HEAR, HEAR: soundman copes with personal challenge; heavy-metal band heals post–Paris WAY TO SHOW: HBO’s Big Little Lies, ABC’s When We Rise, Starz’s The Missing BIZ BUZZ: NatGeo takes its brand to great beyond; foreign affairs heat up for digital streamer DIGITAL DOWNLOAD: NFL’s ratings fumble; new CBS service streams originals 48 FOUNDATION ARCHIVE Earl Hamner, Jr. 54 ACADEMY FOUNDATION A Simpsons star supports TV’s future

Visit emmymagazine.com

56 ME AND MY EMMY Picture editor Michael Polito

On the cover: Corey Hawkins photographed exclusively for emmy by Andrew Eccles for Walter Schupfer Management; jacket and sweater by John Varvatos; jeans by J Brand.

F R O M T H E C R E ATO R S O F T H E G O O D W I F E

SUNDAY FEB 19 CBS.com/goodfight ©2017 CBS Interactive Inc.

in the

The journey from the Tardis to Buckingham Palace has seen Jenna Coleman graduate from being one of TV’s most famous sidekicks to one of history’s greatest rulers.

BIO PICK

Teen Queen MAARTEN DE BOER/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES

Not that she feels particularly imperious on this day.

“We shoot through the winter in an airport hangar in North Yorkshire,” says Coleman, on the set of Masterpiece’s Victoria, “so you leave the makeup truck wearing a crown, but you’re actually wearing wellies on your feet as you stomp through the mud. That kind of grounds you.”

Coleman first came to attention as Clara Oswald in Doctor Who, gallivanting to Gallifrey on the arm of both Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi. In Victoria (airing in seven parts on PBS), she takes on the royal role when Victoria is still relatively unknown — not the grieving potentate, widowed at forty-two. Here she’s something closer to a stroppy teen.

“People have a preconceived idea of Victoria because photography wasn’t invented until late in her life,” Coleman says, “so the only photographs of her are in that stern, regal pose when she’s older. But she’s much more of an unexpected queen.”

The actress prepped for the role by immersing herself in Victoria’s compendious diaries. “It’s the details that give you some idea of what she was like. In one entry she was going for a walk with Lord Melbourne [played in the series by Rufus Sewell] and she suddenly turns to him because she sees a big field in front of her and she wants to go and roll around in it! She’s a teenager and she’s really spirited — that is something I keep coming back to.”

Born in Blackpool, Coleman began performing in musicals at age ten. That was followed by an afterschool job in the British soap Emmerdale, playing a vicar’s niece gone bad. She worked continually on British television until global recognition came with Doctor Who in 2012.

Now, as she preps for the second season of Victoria, she does admit some concern.

“We’re trying to work out how to get through the nine — nine! — births of her children. I’m hoping they’ll do it in a big montage shot.” —Benji Wilson

inthe

mix Bruna Papandrea

Producer packs a powerhouse of talent into HBO’s Big Little Lies.

Even if you haven’t heard of Bruna Papandrea, you’ve likely seen the fruits of her labors, which include two Oscar-nominated films.

On the heels of Gone Girl (she was an executive producer) and Wild (a producer) Papandrea turned her focus to TV: an adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s best-selling novel, Big Little Lies, for HBO. The limited series, premiering February 19, stars Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern as California moms whose picture-perfect lives — envision ultramodern beachfront spreads and flawless faces — aren’t as rosy as they seem. In the opening scene, in fact, a puzzling murder is disclosed. The story then rears back to the chain of events leading to it.

“It’s about what’s really going on in the lives of these women, and how they connect to each other,” says Papandrea, who also viewed the project as an opportunity to unite Kidman and Witherspoon on screen. “When we find multiple complex roles for women, we get excited,” she adds. “This was a doozy. There’s not one female character that doesn’t resonate.”

Women not only dominate in front of the camera — they were largely responsible for setting the series in motion. Pacific Standard, the production company that Papandrea, until recently, ran with Witherspoon, teamed with Kidman’s production company, Blossom Films, to option the novel.

“It all came together very fast and organically,” says Papandrea, who is a friend of Kidman’s and kindled her interest in Lies. Zipping through the novel in one night, Kidman flew to Australia to meet Moriarty; she, Witherspoon and Papandrea persuaded Moriarty to option the rights before anyone could beat them to it.

In addition to Papandrea, other executive producers include David E. 8 EMMY

Kelley, who adapted the book and is showrunner; Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed; Per Saari with Blossom Films; Nathan Ross, Gregg Fienberg, Kidman and Witherspoon.

Papandrea has long sought projects that feature juicy female roles. She, along with Witherspoon, Kidman and Dern, understand that their industry favors youth, especially when it comes to women. They’ve taken matters into their own hands, creating opportunities that showcase their talents as producers and mature actors.

“It’s about controlling your own destiny and telling the stories that you want to see told,” Papandrea says.

Big Little Lies also claws into rape and domestic violence. “Anything that shines a light and gets people talking about an issue that is so sadly relevant is incredibly important to me,” she says.

Raised by a single mom in Australia in working-class circumstances, Papandrea always felt drawn to creative endeavors. She took up acting for a time. She dabbled in hair and makeup artistry. She landed a stint in advertising. Eventually, she says, “It became clear that I was really good at bringing other people’s dreams to reality.”

Her first big break was producing Jonathan Teplitzky’s award-winning Better Than Sex. She was next hired as a production executive at Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack’s Mirage Enterprises. She subsequently served as president of Michael London’s Groundswell Productions.

Now that she’s the mother of a young girl, Papandrea feels an even greater urgency to place women at the center of the action. “I don’t think you can quantify the value of girls seeing themselves in pictures,” she says. “I want [my daughter] to see endless possibilities.” —Ann Farmer

HILARY BRONWYN GAYLE/HBO

PUTTING WOMEN IN THE PICTURE

In an ABC mini, a distinguished writer-director documents the long road to civil rights for the LGBT community and other embattled groups.

Freedoms Found need for more diversity in Hollywood,” Black notes, “but I didn’t bring these people in to be PC. I wanted authenticity.”

The series was shot mostly in Vancouver, but Black persuaded ABC execs to okay a week of filming in San Francisco, where he’d lived in the early ‘90s when AIDS was devastating the gay community.

“I was a teenager apprenticing in the theater, and I saw my mentors and teachers, directors and choreographers getting thin and then just vanishing, one after the other,” he recalls. “Only afterwards was I told that they had died.”

When We Rise concludes with the landmark 2015 Supreme Court decision requiring states to license and recognize same-sex marriage, but Black emphasizes the need to keep moving forward.

“I would give anything in the world for the series to be less topical than it is now. At its core, the show is about the families we’re born into and those we build out of necessity. We have to introduce everyone to each other — whether we pray to a different God or come from different communities — and work together. That’s how you change hearts and minds.” —Paula Chin

PHIL BRAY/ABC

Dustin Lance Black has always been a man on a mission. As a writer-director, he was telling stories about the gay community long before he won an Oscar in 2009 for his screenplay for Milk, the biopic of the slain San Francisco politician and gay-rights icon Harvey Milk, and gave an eloquent acceptance speech, wearing a white knot on his lapel to show his support for same-sex marriage.

With ABC’s When We Rise — an eight-hour miniseries premiering February 27 — he has written another moving script, and once again it’s a labor of love.

“I’ve been working on this for almost four years,” says Black, the show’s creator and an executive producer. “It’s about the history of the LGBT movement in San Francisco over the last four decades, but I also wanted to tell the stories of the people who played important roles in the fight for women’s and civil rights and the peace movement. It’s not just about gays — that’s why it’s called When We Rise.”

The series follows Roma Guy, a women’s rights activist; Ken Jones, a veteran working for African-American rights; Cleve Jones, an LGBT activist; and a nurse known as Diane who assisted HIV-AIDS patients.

While casting those roles was a challenge, “we were very, very lucky,” he says. Mary-Louise Parker and Rachel Griffiths were the first to sign on, as Roma and Diane, respectively. “Rachel asked if we had considered Guy Pearce to play Cleve Jones — we had reached out to him but hadn’t heard back.

Thanks to Rachel, we did.”

Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Kenneth Williams joined the cast as Ken Jones after reading the script, which held a special resonance for him, having lost many friends in New York City during the AIDS crisis.

Also on Black’s checklist was Gus Van Sant, the Oscar-nominated director of Milk who ended up directing the series’ two-hour premiere. “He’s such a wonderful collaborator, and we’re even more brave together than apart,” says Black, who cast a wide net for directors as well as writers — gay and straight, men and women, black and white. (Along with Van Sant and Black, the executive producers of When We Rise include Laurence Mark and Bruce Cohen.)

“There’s a lot of talk about the

Dustin Lance Black on location in San Francisco’s Castro District

TelevisionAcademy.com

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in the

mix With its recent launch on Amazon Channels, MHz Choice is cornering the market on international streaming.

A FOREIGN AFFAIR

Americans’ interest in foreign programming — which many trace back to the 2011 film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — continues to grow, and a recent deal with Amazon Channels is bringing a surge of subscribers to MHz Choice, a subscription-based streaming service featuring new and exclusive international mysteries, dramas and comedies.

Luca Zingaretti in Detective Montalbano

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Peter Haber in Martin Beck

FABRIZIO DI GIULIO; BALDUR BRAGASON

“We are getting millions more eyeballs than we could afford to market to,” says Lance Schwulst, vice-president of content strategy for MHz Choice, of the pact that lets consumers add MHz to their Amazon Prime account.

“Plus, Amazon has over five years of experience when it comes to promoting top shows, and our customer base is a subset of theirs — it’s a win-win for both parties.”

While MHz Choice has previously been available on Apple products, Android and Roku, none of them have the reach of Amazon Channels, which is in approximately half of all U.S. households. “In terms of Amazon’s scale,” observes Frederick Thomas, CEO of MHz Networks, “it does feel a bit like we cut down a tree, made our own surfboard, then headed into 100-foot swells.”

MHz Choice launched in 2015, but its key players have been well versed in international programming since the late ‘90s, when the service first appeared on MHz Networks, a Virginia–based non-commercial broadcaster that serves the Washington, D.C., area and thirty-plus affiliates throughout the U.S. “I’ve always been an internationalist by design, and when I first came to the station in 1993, I decided to give it that slant,” Thomas says. What started with acquiring classic foreign films — the first screening (and pledge drive) featured The Seventh Samurai — soon blossomed into regular programming.

“It proved that there was an audience for this and that they were also willing to pay a little bit of money to get it.”

With the wealth of international TV series out there, it was only natural

to start airing them; Schwulst now makes annual pilgrimages to Cannes and MIPDoc, as well as to smaller events in France, Germany and Scandinavia.

As a result, MHz Networks is the top acquirer of foreign-language content in the U.S. One of its first hits — still its most popular — is Detective Montalbano, an Italian series set on the island of Sicily and based on a series of novels by Andrea Camilleri.

“We were the first international broadcaster [MHz] worked with,” says Bruce Rabinowitz, sales executive in North and South America for RAI, Italy’s national public broadcast company.

“A lot of the content we acquire is based on a literary series, like Detective Montalbano, Beck and Wallander,” explains Schwulst, whose bookbased content also includes Arne Dahl (Sweden), Baantjer Mysteries (the

Netherlands) and Inspector and the Sea (Germany).

“We tend to have a slightly older, female-skewing audience, but one of the common threads with all our viewers is that they are voracious readers,” he continues. “The great thing about television characters based on book characters is that they are very complex, so much of the time the crimes take a back seat to the key players and their idiosyncrasies.”

And crime does not necessarily mean violent. “Aside from being well acted, well written and shot beautifully, a lot of these series actually aren’t that violent,” notes Rabinowitz, who chalks up part of Detective Montalbano’s appeal to Americans’ “endless fascination” with the mafia. Of course, looking at picture-perfect views of Sicily and handsome lead actor Luca Zingaretti doesn’t hurt, either.

While not all programming is based on novels (French law drama Spiral and German philosophical comedy Crime Scene Cleaner are channel favorites), MHz sates viewers’ general curiosity about how others live — what they eat, how they drive, where they vacation, et cetera. “One of my favorite aspects of watching the different shows is realizing that every country has a different-sounding police siren,” Schwulst says with a chuckle. “Plus, it’s great escapism.”

Bjarne Mädel in Crime Scene Cleaner

Despite a seemingly endless supply of content, there are some hurdles in getting programs ready for viewing. Just subtitling a show takes time, money and manpower; MHz Choice works with a modest crew of approximately twenty.

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Also, FCC rules regarding which shows require closed-captioning and which need only subtitles can be tricky. “The new rules specify that if content is released here in a language that is foreign to who it’s being marketed to, subtitles are fine,” Schwulst says. “But a Spanish series on a Spanish network now needs closed-captioning.”

MHz Choice is looking to include both.

“The challenging part is not what we’re doing — we’ve been doing this for a long time,” Thomas says. “The daunting part is that suddenly we are in the big leagues.”

But, like all good relationships, the MHz-Amazon deal is a two-way street. Amazon does not have to acquire the programming, yet it can benefit from the catalog MHz has built up over the years. “And with the streaming technology, we get an accurate view of who’s watching and for how long,” Thomas says. “That makes it easier for us to go out and find more of those people.”

So, for viewers with a soft spot for an English whodunit, a Scandinavian serial killer or a swoony Italian detective, such shows are only a stream away.

And while MHz Choice plans to expand its offerings in comedies and drama, for now, it remains the go-to source for foreign bookish detectives and coldclimate crimes. —Maria Neuman

A double-digit drop in primetime ratings has some wondering if there are too many ways to watch America’s game.

How Much Is Too Much?

RYAN KANG/AP

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HE NFL SEASON THAT CULMINATED IN SUPER BOWL LI ON FEBRUARY 5 WILL BE REMEMBERED FOR ITS MIDLIFE CRISIS, WHEN THE LEAGUE FACED ITS MORTAL LIMITS AS THE SAVIOR OF TRADITIONAL LINEAR TELEVISION. Live broadcasts of pro football had long been one of the last pillars of strength in the eroding ecosystem of traditional television, steadily expanding as viewership, subscriptions and ad sales for every other type of show contracted. But in 2016, that long drive of ratings prosperity suddenly stalled.

Though viewership normalized a bit toward the end of the season, the first nine weeks were brutal — especially in primetime, where viewing of ESPN’s Monday Night Football was down some 20 percent and NBC’s Sunday Night Football was off by 18 percent. Thursday Night Football, which CBS and NBC share with the league’s NFL Network at a licensing cost of $225 million a season for each network, was down a whopping 21.8 percent in total viewership.

The hand-wringing among network executives, media pundits and talk-radio jocks was incessant.

Some blamed the presidential election, which saw concurrent ratings gains for cable networks like Fox News and CNN. “It’s clear that the election had an impact,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters in December. “There’s no question that going head to head with debates, you’re going to get that kind of a [ratings drop] — particularly with an election that may have been more followed than any election in our history.”

Others blamed poor matchups. Fringe theories emerged amid the heated political climate, with some conservatives insisting that the controversial

National Anthem protest initiated by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick at the start of the season turned off legions of fans.

But one theory gathered particular steam: the NFL, which has long proliferated across cable and broadcast channels — and is now on the march in digital streaming, having signed a deal to live-stream games on Twitter — had finally reached the point of oversaturation.

For its part, the NFL pulled back on some new initiatives, such as live-streaming games from Lon-

don on Yahoo. But there are no plans for any major retrenchment, such as dropping Thursday-night games.

Reports circulated that CBS, which had Thursday Night Football rights through the first half of the season, lost $100 million on the package. But late last year, CBS Corporation chief executive Les Moonves maintained the loss wasn’t that high. He defended the league and his company’s TV contract to investors, saying, “It’s still the best product on television.”

—Daniel Frankel

in the

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BIO PICK

Smart Start

These days, Hill inhabits a new character, in the CBS legal drama Doubt. As cocky defense attorney Albert Cobb, he costars with Katherine Heigl on the ensemble drama about a close-knit New York law firm.

Tony Phelan and Joan Rater, the husband-and-wife creator–executive producers of the series, “have done a great job of weaving this web of love, lies and law,” Hill observes, “and all hell breaks loose personally and professionally with the characters.”

The cast includes Elliott Gould as the firm’s legendary leader, Laverne Cox as a transgender Ivy League attorney and Steven Pasquale as Heigl’s client.

With his dance and stage background, Hill has a special appreciation for the set. “One of the good things about being on a law show,” he enthuses, “is there are lots of courtroom scenes, with hardwood floors and open spaces.

With jurors on set, I also have an audience. It kills two birds — I can give a theatrical performance while also working on a television show.”

Albert joins Hill’s pantheon of “smart characters who own the suit they wear, who know exactly who they are,” he says. Another member of that lineup: Miami Dolphins general manager Larry Siefert, Hill’s recurring character on HBO’s Ballers, where he met costar and girlfriend Jazmyn Simon.

“I’m attracted to these characters who work hard and don’t apologize for where they are in life. I’m so thankful for this journey.” —Shelley Gabert

STEVE SCHOFIELD

At age three Dulé Hill was tap-dancing in New Jersey, and at ten he was already an understudy on Broadway. His career has gone on to include films and long-running TV roles, most famously as Charlie Young, personal assistant to Martin Sheen’s U.S. president on NBC’s The West Wing, and as Gus, the crime-solving buddy to James Roday in USA’s Psych.

in the

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Hear and There On location and on set, a sound pro copes with a personal challenge.

After fifteen seasons as an audio mixer for CBS’s The Amazing Race, Bruce Beacom shucked his traveling shoes in 2014, choosing to stay closer to his L.A. home after the birth of his son. Working on the go can be challenging for any crewmember, but Beacom had another consideration — an unusual one for a sound man — he is hearing impaired and has only 80 percent hearing with hearing aids.

Beacom has otosclerosis, a hereditary condition that causes an overgrowth of bone in the middle ear, obstructing the hearing process. He was unaware of the condition until 2000, when at age thirty he began experiencing a siren-like ringing in his ears that escalated to a 95 percent hearing loss.

Nevertheless, he kept working, on the Fox reality show Paradise Hotel and on corporate events.

“Being a location television sound mixer, I was moving around wearing gear that picked up sound on set — I was a walking hearing aid,” says Beacom, who is also a singer-guitarist-composer fronting his own acoustic-funk band. “I would amplify the sound through the mixer into my headphones. I also watched the visual readings on my VU [volume units] meter like a hawk — I relied on those to tell me if I had good sound.”

Determined to save his hearing, Beacom spent three years enduring inadequate hearing aids, tests and misdiagnoses before an audiologist detected otosclerosis. Between 2004 and 2007 he underwent four surgeries, two on each ear, which restored his hearing to 80 percent with aids. He takes a fluoride calcium supplement daily to prevent the condition from progressing further.

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He also wears digital hearing aids with three channels, one custom-designed for sound mixing. “In the jungles on The Amazing Race, I had to make sure to keep my hearing aids dry, because of the humidity,” he says. “Los Angeles is perfect, because it’s so dry here.”

Hayma Washington, chairman of the Television Academy and a former executive producer of The Amazing Race, met Beacom when the sound man joined the show in 2006.

“He is one of the finest sound mixers we’ve had,” Washington says. “It was exciting to work with him and to see how he never let his challenge inhibit him.” It was also exciting for Washington to watch Beacom’s band perform at L.A.’s House of Blues, where the sound pro swapped his usual equipment for an Australian didgeridoo.

At Washington’s invitation, in 2014 Beacom attended the Academy’s “Dynamic & Diverse” pre-Emmys reception, an annual recognition of the diversity within the television community.

Since leaving The Amazing Race, Beacom, who is married to actress Holly Reiser, has worked on such series as HGTV’s House Hunters Renovation, Bravo’s Top Chef and A&E’s Intervention. Now an advocate for hearing loss education, he’s grateful to his doctors for enabling him to keep working — as well as to hear the sweetest sound of all.

“To be able to hear my son’s voice every day,” he says, “is a blessing.”

—Libby Slate

BEN MILLER PHOTO

B

Brooklyn Sudano recalls spending idyllic childhood days on her family’s ranch in California. In Nashville, she was high-school valedictorian at the private Christ Presbyterian Academy. Later, in New York, she excelled in acting classes at Lee Strasberg and signed with Ford modeling.

All along, it was with the loving encouragement of her protective, more-than-famous mom, Donna Summer.

It’s been a charmed life for the actress, currently one of the stars of Taken, NBC’s new series riff on the Liam Neeson–action franchise. In this prequel she plays Asha, an environmental attorney bonded by tragedy to fledgling CIA agent Bryan Mills (Clive Standen).

Sudano knows she’s lucky. “I’ve had an incredibly blessed life,” she says. “There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not fully aware of that. I’ve always had this sense that there’s a responsibility to live up to the sacrifices that my parents, grandparents and all the people who came before me made for me.”

There have been rough times along the way. Summer died in 2012, at sixty-three, and the grandmother who helped raise Sudano died soon after. Still, like her mom and dad Bruce Sudano (the singer-songwriter who helped pen Summer’s disco classic “Bad Girls”), and sisters Amanda and Mimi — singers, too — Sudano cops to a “restless, creative mind.”

Early on, her modeling gigs led to commercial gigs. Her big break came in 2003, when she was cast as Damon Wayans’s daughter-in-law, Vanessa, on My Wife and Kids. Guest parts on series from Fox’s 90210 to HBO’s Ballers have since kept her busy (she most recently stood out as James Franco’s ex-wife in Hulu’s 11.22.63).

Now she’s thrilled to be doing a thriller full-time: “I love action and suspense.”

Married and mom to a three-yearold girl, she credits her gung-ho ways to her own mother. “She said, ‘Don’t be BIO PICK afraid — you just have to jump.’ I know she would be so proud of me.”

Next leap: her own pop album. And her downtime hijinks with Taken costar Jennifer Beals are helping prep her for that endeavor. “We sing at the top of our lungs while doing Pilates together.”

—John Griffiths

Every Address

TelevisionAcademy.com

15

in the

mix

NatGeo looks to A-listers for programs with bold storytelling and visual impact.

When your brand can take you anywhere, where do you go?

To Mars, of course.

The recent shift in programming strategy at National Geographic began last fall with the premiere of Mars, a six-part series from Hollywood heavyweights Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. Combining scripted drama and special effects with documentary segments, the series followed a 2033 mission to the red planet in its debut season; a second has already been confirmed.

“We are taking much bigger swings — more audacious, more epic, more creatively ambitious,” says Courteney Monroe, National Geographic Global Networks CEO. “Our vision is to become the world’s leading destination for premium science, adventure and exploration content.”

National Geographic — known as National Geographic’s Courteney Monroe National Geographic Channel until its 2016 rebrand — had populated its lineup with male-skewing reality shows in the past few years.

“We weren’t as successful at that genre as some of our competitors, and that’s not really what people expect from National Geographic,” Monroe reflects. “We are in this era of so much competition, so much great content — and so much clutter, quite frankly.

There’s no way to break through without being exceptional or distinctive.”

So the network adopted a qualityover-quantity approach — seeking content with both elevated storytelling and visual impact. “This is not something we’re doing with just one or two programs,” she points out. “It’s our entire schedule.”

The network also hired Carolyn Bernstein, as executive vice-president and head of global scripted development and production, to bring in more scripted content; in 2017 that will include the anthology series Genius, another project from Grazer and Howard’s 16 EMMY

Imagine Entertainment. The first season of Genius will dramatize the life of Albert Einstein, drawing from Walter Isaacson’s biography. Howard, who had not previously directed scripted primetime television, directed the first episode of the series, which casts Geoffrey Rush as the older Einstein and Johnny Flynn as the young scientist.

Also airing in 2017 is the scripted miniseries The Long Road Home. Produced

by Mike Medavoy, it is based on a book by ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz about a cavalry division from Ford Hood, Texas, that was ambushed in Sadr City during the Iraq War in what came to be known as Black Sunday.

In the non-scripted realm, National Geographic will run a slate of feature documentaries, including Sebastian Junger’s Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS; Alex Gibney’s Water & Power: A California Heist; Simon Chinn and Jason Chinn’s LA 92, which looks back at the Los Angeles riots; and a yet-to-be-titled documentary on Jane Goodall from Brett Morgen.

One Strange Rock is an event series on tap for next year. “It is a 2018 project because it’s 100 weeks in production,” Monroe explains. Produced by Darren Aronofsky and Nutopia, the naturalhistory series will explore the fragility of life on Earth.

To land the big-name talent behind these programs, Monroe embarked on “a charm offensive” back in 2015. Armed with funds from National Geographic partner 21st Century Fox, she held meetings with the creative community, getting the word out that National Geographic wanted to work with A-listers — and had the budget to do so.

The National Geographic brand “opened a million doors for us,” she says. “Everybody grew up with it. Everybody has a strong affection for it. Everybody respects it.”

—Christine Champagne

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC; ELI MEIR

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L O S C A B O S ( O p e n i n g L a t e 2 0 17 )

in the

mix For Colin Hanks, chronicling the Bataclan attack meant telling the tragedy endured by his friends — and making “something positive out of all this.”

Helping to Heal The new HBO documentary Nos Amis — French for “our friends” — transports viewers to Paris, where the southern California–based band Eagles of Death Metal was midsong when ISIL terrorists attacked on November 13, 2015, leaving eighty-nine dead.

Jesse Hughes and Dave Catching at the the Olympia Theatre in Paris, three months after the Bataclan attack

Colin Hanks

But when he poked his head in, he recalls, “pretending that I’m looking for someone I know,” Homme spotted him. “He said, ‘Hey, get in here!’” Hanks remembers. “And that’s how it started. We’ve been friends ever since.”

Hanks would also soon become friends with Jesse Hughes, Homme’s childhood pal from Palm Desert, California, the cape-clad driving force behind Eagles of Death Metal. (The band is a part-time project for Homme.)

When Hanks needed music for the trailer of his first documentary, All Things Must Pass, his 2015 homage to Tower Records, his EDM friends offered a song. They also agreed to play at the doc’s premiere party in the old Tower Records parking lot.

Less than a month later, Eagles of Death Metal — minus Homme, who was back home with his pregnant wife — witnessed a barrage of bullets in Paris.

In the aftermath, Hanks, who’d just come off the Tower Records doc and had begun starring in the CBS series Life in Pieces, had a quick decision to make. The band would be heading back to Paris for their first post-attack show. And while the musicians weren’t looking to make a film to document the occasion, if it were to happen, they’d only work with Hanks.

“We literally had two weeks to find financing, crew up, book tickets,” Hanks reports. “It was seat-of-our-pants all the way through.”

He decided to dive in, driven mostly by the desire “to make something positive out of all this.” But he recalls having to overcome his instinct to protect his friends. “I instantly went, ‘No. That’s too personal.’ This whole thing has [presented] all sorts of emotional conflicts for me.”

Hanks and his two main subjects eventually agreed to “get uncomfortable.

And when we’d all be uncomfortable,” he says, “that’s when we would lean in and try and be even more open.”

The result is a touching film about the bonds between fans and artists, bandmates and fellow musicians, old amigos and lifelong comrades.

“I’m proud that a lot of people knew about this event, but didn’t know anything about the story behind it,” Hanks says. “Ultimately the thing I’m most proud of is, it comes from a mutual place of wanting to help your friends. That is always important.” —Bob Makela

JOE PUGLIESE/AUGUST; DAVID WOLFF–PATRICK/COURTESY OF HBO

But the film, directed by Colin Hanks and debuting this February, is not just a tale of tragedy — it is a powerful story of friendship and recovery as the band made its post-attack return to Paris. And Hanks most likely would not have been involved if not for a singular moment six years earlier, at another music venue 6,000 miles away, on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip.

In late 2009, Hanks secured a backstage pass for a show at the Roxy to see Them Crooked Vultures, a rock super-group featuring John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) and Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age). After the show, the actor-director — who’d gone alone — followed a long hallway backstage, to a room full of people he was sure he wouldn’t know.

RYAN WEST

BIO PICK

Comedy, Every Kind

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Nearly twenty years into writing and producing comedy for television, Vernon Chatman is still thankful for the opportunity.

“I get paid to have fun,” enthuses Chatman, whose résumé includes Louis C.K.’s Horace and Pete and Louie as well as South Park, Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Chris Rock Show. As a co-creator and/or executive producer, he’s been behind MTV2’s Wonder Showzen and three series on Adult Swim: Xavier: Renegade Angel, Delocated and The Heart, She Holler. And he’s an executive producer of the TruTV reality series Jon Glaser Loves Gear.

Along the way, he been nominated for thirteen Emmys and won four: three as a producer for South Park and once as a writer for The Chris Rock Show.

Chatman manages to thrive in many mediums, from late night — which requires a mastery of jokes and bits — to Adult Swim, a deep dive into quirkiness. “It’s all comedy,” he says. “I just love comedy, so I never made any distinctions.”

He also simply loves to work. When he’s not writing or producing, he voic-

es animated characters, most notably, Towelie, South Park’s talking towel.

“I get excited by ideas, and so many of my friendships are based around getting excited about some creative project. Most of the time, even when I’m hanging out with friends, I’m working on something.”

When he was growing up in the Bay Area, Chatman filled notebooks with jokes and sketches. After graduating from San Francisco State University, he moved to New York City in the mid-1990s to do stand-up comedy. Keenen Ivory Wayans gave Chatman his first big break when he hired him to write for The Keenen Ivory Wayans Show.

It didn’t take long for Chatman to ditch stand-up so he could focus on a career behind the scenes in television. The draw? “I could use all these tools — actors, props, music and editing — that I didn’t have in stand-up.”

He was also relieved to get away from drunken hecklers. “Stand-up definitely toughens you up, and I admire people who do it,” Chatman says. “But it was like going through a gauntlet of idiocy.” —Christine Champagne TelevisionAcademy.com

19

in the

mix For season two of Starz’s European-set anthology, The Missing, its creators embrace a new, complex family tale.

JULIAN BROAD STUDIO

Danger in Paradise

The Missing’s Keeley Hawes, David Morrissey, Abigail Hardingham and Jake Davies

Monschau, a German resort town on the Belgian border, is a picture-postcard tourist destination with a dark past. Nestled in the Ardennes forest with the Rur River running through it and a thirteenth-century castle sitting pristinely above, this is where some of the most brutal fighting of World War II took place.

Today, in the town square, a shadow has once again settled over idyllic surroundings, as Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey show a photo to passersby with increasing desperation. The backdrop may be blissful, but their faces are not.

It’s a location shoot for the second installment of Starz’s limited anthology series The Missing, debuting February 12. In the first season, a young boy was abducted during a family holiday in France and his distraught parents spent eight episodes trying to discover what had happened to him.

This new season continues the broad theme — families losing a child and falling apart — but tells an entirely different story with a whole new cast.

Between takes, David Morrissey (The Walking Dead) explains the set-up: “Sam [Webster, his character] is an officer in the British army and he, his wife and two children are based on a British base in Germany. When his thirteenyear-old daughter is kidnapped, the family is obviously devastated. Our story starts eleven years later, when a girl walks back into their life… and it’s their daughter.”

Keeley Hawes (The Hollow Crown, Upstairs Downstairs) joins the conversation: “…Or is it their daughter? I play Gemma, Sam’s wife, and the 20 EMMY

awful thing is that when she sees her daughter, something doesn’t click. This girl has been through a terrible ordeal when she comes back and she looks awful — and yet Gemma doesn’t have that maternal instinct. And so Sam and Gemma’s relationship starts to go into this terrible decline.”

It transpires that the Websters’ daughter was being held with another girl, whose name sparks the interest of French detective Julien Baptiste, the only constant from season one. Tchéky Karyo is back in the role, showing pictures of suspects on his phone to bystanders as the camera rolls.

Hair cropped, gaunt and gray, Karyo looks very different from the first season. But distinctive looks are important in The Missing. The new season, like the first, flashes back and forth in time to tell the story through a cracked glass. Visual cues as to the year are vital, which is why Morrissey is sporting a prosthetic scar on his face.

“It runs all the way down my back,” he says. “Because of the way our story is structured, we see Sam in 2014 when he doesn’t have a scar, but we very quickly see him in the present day, when he is scarred. He’s obviously been in a fire. But we don’t know what caused that fire, and we don’t know the circumstances surrounding it.”

Complications, misreads and switchbacks are all part of The Missing’s signature storytelling style.

“When we were writing it,” says Jack Williams, who created the

Tchéky Karyo

DIGITAL

DOWNLOAD

With two high-profile series, CBS tempts viewers to its new All Access service.

All the Way ANS OF THE GOOD WIFE HAVE BEEN EAGERLY AWAITING THE FEBRUARY 19 LAUNCH OF THE SPINOFF THE GOOD FIGHT, AS DIANE LOCKHART (CHRISTINE BARANSKI) OF STERN, LOCKHART AND GARDNER PRESSES ON WITH HER QUEST FOR JUSTICE. BUT IT’S AN EVEN BIGGER DAY FOR THE BROADCAST TV INDUSTRY. CBS Corporation is embarking on a bold new strategy. While the first episode of The Good Fight will debut simultaneously on the CBS Television Network and CBS All Access, the subsequent nine episodes of season one will be available only on the latter platform, a subscription on-demand steaming service.

CBS will apply the same strategy to its highly anticipated Star Trek reboot, with the first episode of the Bryan Fuller–produced Star Trek: Discovery debuting on CBS (at press time the date was not known) and the subsequent twelve installments available only via All Access.

These are not low-budget web series. Star Trek: Discovery has a reported budget of $6 million to $7 million per episode. (Although the company has said that cost is completely offset by an international sale of the show to Netflix that covers virtually every foreign region.)

CBS All Access has some 1.2 Christine Baranski (far right) leads the cast of The Good Fight. million subscribers; the network hopes to have 4 million by 2020.

Customers pay $5.99 a month — $9.99 if they choose to avoid commercials — for a live feed of their local CBS station as well as on-demand access to just about every current and archival CBS program.

Of course, back in the day, if a big, splashy original series like Star Trek: Discovery averaged only 1.2 million — or even 4 million — viewers in broadcast primetime, CBS would probably be talking cancellation. But TV’s new distribution paradigm calls for new math.

Not everyone in the industry is a believer. “I can see viewers who are fans of the two franchises, but who also get CBS through their pay-TV providers, signing up for a month just to binge on the series and then dropping All Access,” says analyst Alan Wolk.

And CBS’s distribution partners aren’t so happy, either. Pay-TV operators pay an average of $2.50 a month per subscriber to retransmit the signals of local CBS stations, according to research firm SNL Kagan. So cable and satellite TV companies are wondering why they should continue paying when CBS is already approaching their customers directly with a streaming service.

But CBS is driving a harder line than most of its broadcast rivals when it comes to distribution talks with pay-TV companies. With All Access, CBS feels like it can distribute its own shows.

AT&T, for example, recently launched its highly anticipated DirecTV Now live streaming service with ABC, Fox and NBC — but without CBS. Leslie Moonves, chief executive of CBS Corporation, says the two sides remain in negotiations. CBS is also conspicuously absent from Dish Network’s virtual pay-TV service, Sling TV. CBS has been traditionally wary of licensing its content to Netflix, as well. These days, CBS Corporation — which operates two other two streaming platforms, the over-the-top version of Showtime and news platform CBSN — seems focused on building its own Netflix.

Fuller, for example, has noted that the first season of Star Trek: Discovery follows a continuous story arc — a format pioneered by Netflix originals. Discovery and The Good Fight, meanwhile, will also be packaged in a binge-inducing interface familiar to Netflix fans.

“We focus a lot on what happens when you finish an episode,” says Jon Mantell, vice-president of digital products and video for CBS Interactive. “We want to make it so you don’t even go to the bathroom because you’re so engaged — you just move on to the next episode.” —Daniel Frankel

SOPHIE MUTEVELIAN; JOE PUGLIESE/CBS

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anthology series with his brother Harry (both are also executive producers), “we kept looking at each other and saying, ‘Oh my God, this is so complicated — are we insane for doing this?’

But we decided to embrace it and go, ‘People are clever; people like complicated.’ Particularly now, when you can rewatch online, then go on Twitter and discuss it.”

For the second season, his brother adds, there will be plenty to discuss. Not least how a drama called The Missing can focus on a story in which someone comes back.

“Everyone assumes it’s a happy ending when the person you’ve lost comes back, but the idea we had for season two was that it’s just the beginning,” Harry Williams says. “And it’s not necessarily a happy ending because of what they’ve been through as a family. They’re going to be damaged. It’s just the beginning of another long journey to somewhere else. That’s what we wanted to explore.”

If the first installment, which echoed real-life abduction cases and referenced pedophilia and organized crime, is anything to go by, the second season will not be an easy ride.

“It’s odd, isn’t it?” Jack Williams muses. “I don’t know how we ended up writing that much dark subject matter. I suppose because it leads to such extremes of human emotion and experience, and it’s fascinating to explore that.”

Meanwhile, back in Monschau’s town square, Hawes and Morrissey are about to resume knocking on doors, asking about that face in the picture. They’re filming scenes for the final few episodes. Last time round, the missing child was never found. Surely this time all will end well?

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” Hawes says with a laugh. “Every time you think, ‘It can’t get any worse,’ it does. There’s nothing that this family doesn’t go through.” —Benji Wilson

TelevisionAcademy.com

21

in the

Sometimes life comes full circle. Growing up in the 80’s — in scrappy Scranton, Pennsylvania — Fred Tallaksen caught the dance bug from weekend TV standard Solid Gold.

22 EMMY

BIO PICK

As the World Twirls

DIANA GOMEZ

“I was obsessed with the dancers, especially Darcel [Wynne],” recalls the Los Angeles resident, who is currently creating routines on season two of the ABC comedy The Real O’Neals. “I used to twirl my sister around the house so fast, it drove my dad crazy.“ The choreographer, who has been nominated twice for an Emmy for his work on Malcolm in the Middle, says the Fox show was a hoot. “It was an amazing job! I once spent almost a month teaching Bryan Cranston how to roller skate.”

And with competition shows like Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance now television staples, choreography has entered the cultural mainstream. “I think people finally realize how much work it takes,” Tallaksen notes. “Especially for episodic television, where the timing is pretty fast. For last year’s Halloween episode of The Real O’Neals, I hired thirty dancers for two separate scenes and there was a week to get it together.”

That’s one week — to prep, teach dancers and actors, as well as work with costume and production designers, before shooting on the last day.

Still, “I love it,” he enthuses. “Cameras pick up the tiniest details, like a facial expression or the flick of a wrist, unlike when I work on a live show, where every movement has to be big so it registers with the audience.”

Tallaksen credits his success to a tireless work ethic, cheery demeanor and razor-sharp discipline. “When I first started as a dancer, I always arrived on time, knew the steps and paid attention,” he says.

That led to a career that is going strong after more than twenty years and includes work with the likes of Madonna and Jennifer Lopez. “There’s something really magical about just being able to say, ‘I’m here — I’m doing this.’”

Another solid gold moment. —Maria Neuman

CHAD BATKA

Tricia Brock

Many people can recall childhood events that, in retrospect, seemed to telegraph their future careers. Then there’s Tricia Brock.

BIO PICK

Message From Mars

“I wish my trajectory were that clear,” says the director of shows ranging from 30 Rock to The Walking Dead. “Where I grew up — on a farm in southern Missouri — anything to do with show business might as well have been on Mars.”

She began by working as a production assistant on commercials in New York, then produced a documentary about sorority rush week at a Southern college, and after that turned to writing.

“I moved to L.A., wrote my first script — which Paramount bought — and started my career as a writer,” she says. “I was so young. I thought I’d won the lottery and would keep winning the lottery. I had a lot to learn about the vagaries of Hollywood.”

She penned episodes of several TV series and reworked other writers’ scripts before learning about AFI’s Conservatory Directing Workshop for Women.

“I don’t know why I knew AFI was going to be my path and open the door, but I knew,” she says.

“It took me five years to get in. I did that in 2001, but I’ll never forget the orientation. Jean Firstenberg was head of AFI at the time, and when talking to the eight of us who had been chosen, she referred to us as directors. It was one of those lightning-bolt moments.”

Brock’s 2002 short film, The Car Kid — starring James Franco, Meat Loaf and the late Brad Renfro — drew attention at film festivals and helped her secure financing for a feature. By 2005, television beckoned.

“Ilene Chaiken hired me to direct on The L Word,” she recalls. “It was my first job in television.

It took a herculean effort to get Showtime to approve me, and it’s been building ever since.”

And how. Brock’s recent work includes Mozart in the Jungle, Mr. Robot, Ray Donovan, Orange Is the New Black, Outcast, Younger, Girls and all eight episodes of Margot vs. Lily, Nike’s first YouTube scripted series.

“I love being in a job where I’m expected to have opinions, because I always do. I’m well suited to this job for that reason. I’ve definitely found my match.” —Paula Hendrickson TelevisionAcademy.com

23

STYLING BY MICAH AND WAYMAN FOR STARWORKS GROUP GROOMING BY SYDNEY SOLLOD FOR THE WALL GROUP PROPS BY SCOTT STONE FOR PETER G INC TURTLENECK AND SUIT BY FERRAGAMO

OREY HAWKINS BREEZES INTO THE lobby of the Greenwich Hotel on a frigid New York morning.

Sporting a black T-shirt, black jeans, black Kangol baseball hat and an infectious smile, the 24: Legacy star looks more like the steadfast Juilliard student he was just six years ago than the new face of the Fox network. Sitting down for breakfast, he eschews the fad diets circulating Hollywood, ordering scrambled eggs with cheddar and a bagel and cream cheese.

It’s six days before Christmas, and the twenty-eight-year-old actor is in town to promote the reinvigorated franchise before heading to his native D.C. for the holidays. Despite a packed schedule, Hawkins managed to sneak out the night before to catch John Goodman on Broadway in The Front Page. The two actors bonded while working on the upcoming monster tentpole Kong: Skull Island and struck up a friendship. “He’s like a mentor,” Hawkins says.

Given the high-profile turn his career is about to take, Hawkins may need some guidance. On Sunday, February 5, Fox debuts the highly anticipated series — which also stars Miranda Otto and Jimmy Smits as the D.C.

power couple enmeshed in the drama — in the plum post–Super Bowl slot.

Gone is Kiefer Sutherland’s iconic counterterrorist agent, Jack Bauer. In his place is Hawkins’s Eric Carter, an ex–Army Ranger and the only man standing between America and the largest domestic terror attack in history.

“The challenge is making sure that every single moment is honest, no matter what,” he says. “It’s doing Eric Carter justice. Not trying to fill Jack Bauer’s shoes. Not trying to step into Kiefer’s legacy.”

For a kid who grew up in a gang-ridden D.C. neighborhood — not unlike the former home Carter is forced to revisit for protection — it’s a dream opportunity, far bigger than his breakout film role as Dr. Dre in the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton. Even hit films linger for just a few weeks in theaters and the national conversation, inevitably giving way to the next box-office champ. But as the centerpiece of Fox’s crown jewel, Hawkins gains a whole new visibility in the American home on a weekly basis.

Not surprisingly, he’s feeling the weight. “For Fox to say, ‘I think he can carry this network and carry this franchise,’ is a huge, huge responsibility,” he states. “An honor.”

Like a hard-core but humble Hercules (chains? what chains?), Corey Hawkins lment of the prized

A LEGEND

BY TATIANA SIEGEL • PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW ECCLES FOR WALTER SCHUPFER MANAGEMENT

TelevisionAcademy.com

25

UST ASK FOX TELEVISION GROUP’S GARY NEWMAN — CO-CHAIRMAN AND CEO WITH DANA WALDEN — AND HE WILL ACKNOWLEDGE THAT EXPECTATIONS ARE SKY HIGH. WHEN FOX LAUNCHED THE FIRST TRAILER FOR THE SHOW, DURING GAME ONE OF THE WORLD SERIES, IT RACKED UP 42 MILLION VIEWS IN ONE WEEK, HE NOTES. THE STAKES ARE EQUALLY STRATOSPHERIC FOR THE SERIES THAT WILL AIR IN THE MONDAY 8 P.M. SLOT. “A lot is riding on this,” Newman admits. “We’ve given it the premier launch opportunity that any series will have this year, so it really is critical to us in terms of the success of our season, to say nothing of the fact that this is a treasured Fox series that we did not bring back lightly. If we didn’t think we had a great story and great actors and the right time running it, we wouldn’t take a chance with it. It’s too precious to us.”

Precious might be an understatement. The original 24 ran eight seasons on the network and nabbed the top Emmy prize in 2006 for outstanding drama. With its signature ticking-clock, real-time format, the series also spawned the 2008 telefilm 24: Redemption and the twelve-episode specialevent series 24: Live Another Day in 2014. As a testament to Jack Bauer’s global appeal, Live Another Day aired in more than 150 countries and was a top U.S. series in the U.K., Canada and Australia. The second season of a local version of 24 in India dominated the Indian Television Academy Awards in 2016, where it took five honors.

Perhaps more important, the original 24 captured the zeitgeist in a way that few series have. The pilot, shot prior to 9/11, aired less than two months after the nation-altering terror attacks of 2001. Topics like interrogation torture played out on screen in prescient fashion, before waterboarding became a news-cycle talking point and household concept. Sadly, the threat of domestic terrorism never receded — nor did U.S. military engagement — setting the stage for a 24 rebirth.

In 2014, Manny Coto and Evan Katz began mulling the idea of what happened to the field team that brought down 9/11 architect Osama bin Laden, given that many members reportedly went into hiding due to fear of retaliation. The two writers, veterans of the original series and showrunners of Live Another Day, approached 24 creators Joel Surnow and Bob Cochran for their blessing to proceed.

“We wanted a continuity and graciousness about it all,” Katz recalls.

Surnow and Cochran gave them a thumbs-up, and Cochran even agreed to join the writers’ room for season one if the project moved forward.

Coto and Katz then wrote a pilot script and joined 24 executive producers Brian Grazer and Howard Gordon to pitch Newman, outlining the multiseason arc they wanted to tell. The drama would kick off in the wake of the death of a fictitious terrorist, rather than bin Laden. Newman sparked to the idea and turned to Sutherland to gauge his interest in reprising Jack Bauer.

“We went to Kiefer first to see if he wanted to play it,” Newman says. “He loved the script but felt that he didn’t want to go back and play that role again.

He happily signed on as an executive producer.”

With the Sutherland option off the table, Coto and Katz tweaked the script, building it around a next-generation protagonist but keeping the con26 EMMY

cept of a terrorist hunter being hunted back home. They then began looking for their leading man, one who could potentially bridge 24 loyalists and millennial audiences. Katz’s wife, veteran casting director Lisa Miller Katz, had just begun working on the pilot in 2015 when she saw Straight Outta Compton.

“She called me from the parking lot of the movie theater and said in a very excited way, ‘I got your guy! I got your guy!’” Katz remembers. “Then we saw the movie, and Corey is literally the only person we gave the script to [for the Eric Carter role]. We Skyped with him — he was in Vietnam and Australia shooting Kong. He read it, we Skyped again and, remarkably, he said yes.”

It was remarkable, indeed, considering that film offers were beginning to roll in for Hawkins post-Compton. At the time, the actor was considering two film roles, both endorsed by his agents at ICM Partners. But he was swayed by the prospect of providing young black men with a recognizable small-screen hero — something he’d never had growing up.

“On network television I never got to see a face that looks like this,” he says, pointing to his own, “that didn’t have superpowers. I remember The Cosby Show, but that was something completely different. Comedy. There was a lightness to it and sort of unrealistic perfection. Eric Carter is not a perfect guy. He has flaws. He can be an antihero, which is even more interesting. That’s why I chose this instead of a film — it was like, ‘This might be our only chance.’ You know how trends go with television. Next year, the networks might not be open to taking risks.”

With Hawkins in, Coto and Katz moved on to casting the husband-andwife team essential to the narrative: Rebecca Ingram, the former head of fictitious agency CTU, and John Donovan, the senator and presidential candidate. Homeland executive producer Gordon knew Miranda Otto from her season-five arc on that Showtime series.

“Howard was really impressed with what she had done on the show,” Katz says. “I was a fan from The Lord of the Rings days, and I’d seen her in a number of movies. Her name came up, and the studio loved it. We all thought it was a fantastic idea.”

Otto embraced the notion of playing the head of an American intelligence agency, despite there being no real-life female precedent to draw upon. She also felt the script accurately depicted the new nature of violent extremism — in which lone-wolf strikes have replaced large-scale coordinated attacks — as well as the frictional relationship between sound bite–ready politicians and the super-secret alphabet agencies.

“I thought it was really current, and it spoke about the kind of random nature of terrorism today,” says the Australian actress. “What fascinated me about the character was that she was involved in the two worlds of Washington: the world of intelligence and the political world of running for president.”

SUIT BY Z ZEGNA; T-SHIRT BY J BRAND

“THE CHALLENGE IS MAKING SURE THAT EVERY SINGLE MOMENT IS HONEST, NO MATTER WHAT. IT’S DOING ERIC CARTER JUSTICE. NOT TRYING TO FILL JACK BAUER’S SHOES. NOT TRYING TO STEP INTO KIEFER’S LEGACY.”

COAT BY RALPH LAUREN; SWEATER BY JOE FRESH; PANTS BY TOPMAN; SHOES BY TO BOOT NEW YORK

can-Americans growing up in the city would do,” Hawkins says, “and that’s go and support a country that for all intents and purposes never supported him. It’s a fascinating choice. And that’s the choice we’re continuing to explore as we get into the story.”

Toward the end of production on Kong: Skull Island, Hawkins began training with crewmembers to slim down to his current buff physique for the Carter role.

What he didn’t realize at first was that many of his workout mates hailed from the armed forces.

“We had a lot of military cats working on Skull Island, and we talked about the toll that it took, the things that they had done and had seen. It was really interesting to talk to them about what it means to be a soldier and what it means to come home from a war.”

A

FTER PRODUCTION WRAPS IN

February on the twelve episodes of 24: Legacy’s season one, Hawkins will enjoy a homecoming in a sense when he returns to Broadway. Starting April 25, he’ll star opposite Allison Janney and John Benjamin Hickey in Six Degrees of Separation as the charming con man Paul, a role originated on Broadway by Courtney B. Vance and played by Will Smith in the film adaptation.

If Hawkins needs a vacation, he won’t get one beyond those few days between Christmas and New Year’s in D.C., where the agenda was to include a birthday surprise for his police-officer mother and some binge watching (Black Mirror and Stranger Things are current obsessions) before his return to the 24 set in Atlanta.

“We literally finish 24, and I get right on a plane and come straight here to rehearsal, which was the same with 24,” he says, without a hint of self-pity. “I got off the plane from Vietnam on Skull Island and came literally into the read-through with executives and everybody.”

Hawkins did treat himself to a vacation after last year’s upfronts, when he learned of the Super Bowl lead-out spot. As a gift to himself, he headed to Florence, Italy, and bought a Rolex to commemorate the trip. It remains the only part of his get-up this morning that betrays a hint of “star.”

JACKET AND SHIRT BY JOHN VARVATOS; JEANS BY DSQUARED2 ; BOOTS BY FRYE BOOTS Staying humble is a high priority for Hawkins, who When it came to casting the charismatic candidate Donovan, the Emmystill does his own laundry. He also rides the subway. In fact, he loves the subwinning actor Jimmy Smits topped the wish list. Coto, Katz and Gordon invited way, feeling a profound sense of community when packed in with the shovSmits to an informal meeting over cigars. ing, cranky urbanites on a winter day. He is eager to return for an extended “We treated Jim to a couple Cubans and ran him through the part,” Coto period to New York, a city he fell for during his days at Juilliard and that aligns recalls, “and lucky us, he basically said yes.” with his own sensibility.

The cigars helped, Smits reports, but an endorsement from a few key For Smits, who has worked with many stars over the years who dazzled advisors sealed the deal. then fizzled, Hawkins possesses all the tools to lead 24: Legacy into the pan“My big barometer for any of these things is my kids and my nephews, theon alongside its predecessor. who are huge fans [of 24]. And when they heard about the choices being “When you’re the number one on the call sheet, you set the tenor,” he made casting-wise, it really resonated with them. They were into the guy who says. “And I’m very impressed with Corey’s work ethic. But more than anyplayed Dr. Dre,” he says with a laugh. thing, I see somebody who is very grounded and has staying power.”

But there is much more to Hawkins. A classically trained Shakespearean Hawkins is too self-effacing to agree. Instead, like his new alter ego, he actor (he made his Broadway debut as Tybalt in the 2013 revival of Romeo pivots to the obstacle in front of him: the onus of responsibility. and Juliet), he is as comfortable reciting iambic pentameter as gangsta rap “Super Bowl night. You cannot ask for a bigger timeslot than that. It’s a rhymes. That seeming contradiction plays into the persona of Eric Carter, a lot of pressure, but I guess I’m as ready as I’m going to be.” complicated protagonist for a complicated era, one that sees many disillusioned inner-city African-Americans rejecting the call to patriotism.

Go behind the scenes of the emmy cover photo shoot.

“He chose to do something that is so contradictory to what most AfriVisit TelevisionAcademy.com/cover.

30 EMMY

JACKET BY THEORY; SHIRT BY JOHN VARVATOS

Lifetime’s executives and creative talent include (from left) Tanya Lopez, senior vice-president of original movies; filmmaker Dianne Houston; Danielle Carrig, senior vicepresident of publicity and public affairs; Sara Rea, executive producer and showrunner on Project Runway; director Janice Cooke; and (foreground) director Amy Barrett.

With its Broad Focus initiative, Lifetime proves it wants women running the shows. “Women don’t need another internship,” says the exec who started it all. “They need work.”

BY LISA ROSEN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELISABETH CAREN HAIR AND MAKEUP BY LINDA ZIRKUS AND SHELLENA GONZALEZ

It all started with a gleam in Danielle Carrig’s eye. As senior vice-president of publicity and public aairs, she saw that 2015’s top ďŹ ve movies on adsupported cable were all Lifetime movies — and all were directed by women (Cleveland Abduction, directed by Alex Kalymnios; Whitney, directed by Angela Bassett, A Deadly Adoption, directed by Rachel Goldenberg; Perfect High, directed by Vanessa Parise; and With This Ring, directed by Nzingha Stewart). “I stepped back and said, ‘If we’re a network dedicated to women’s content and women as an audience, we should be that gold standard for the inFrom left: Judy Reyes, Roselyn Sanchez, Ana Ortiz and Dania Ramirez of Devious Maids

dustry in terms of hiring women to make the content as well,’� Carrig recalls.

She had long participated in conversations about how to bring more women into the industry, but the time had come to move beyond the talk. “The next iteration of what we do collectively has ďŹ nally arrived. It’s leveraging our positions of power and being unapologetic about it, and saying, ‘Panels are great, workshops are great, but we actually can do more,’ and start doing it.â€? That meant real, paid jobs — not just the chance to shadow another director. “Women don’t need another internship; they need work.â€?

She broached the idea with Nancy Dubuc, CEO of Lifetime’s parent company, A+E Networks. That’s all it took, Carrig says. “When Nancy heard what the vision would be and how she could be a part of it, it was like, ‘Absolutely, we need to do this. I’m going to pave the way and clear all the paths of any obstacles.’�

From there, the rest of Lifetime took up the mandate. “And then we had to name it. Believe me, that was a bigger conversation than the program itself,� says Tanya Lopez, senior vicepresident of original movies, who was instrumental in putting the plan into motion.

FUNNY THING IS LIFETIME WAS ALREADY DOING BETTER THAN THE REST OF THE INDUSTRY IN

WHILE WOMEN MADE UP PERCENT OF THE EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS ON TELEVISION OVERALL LIFETIME’S TOTAL WAS PERCENT BUT ITS STATS FOR SERIES WRITERS AND DIRECTORS WERE ABOUT AS DISMAL AS THOSE OF TV OVERALL AFTER INSTITUTING BROAD FOCUS IN THOSE NUMBERS INCREASED RADICALLY IN WOMEN MADE UP PERCENT OF LIFETIME’S WRITERS

PERCENT OF ITS DIRECTORS AND

PERCENT OF ITS PRODUCERS OVERALL INDUSTRY NUMBERS WEREN’T AVAILABLE AT PRESS TIME Broad Focus takes a multi-dimensional approach. First, simply hire women. And not just the same few women who are on all the lists in town. “Our programmers who run the shows — Devious Maids, for instance — they said, Look, when you hire this year’s slate of directors, you 34 EMMY

STUART PETTICAN

LIFETIME’S BROAD FOCUS INITIATIVE DOES JUST THAT IT FOCUSES ON BROADS THE NAME IS SO HILARIOUS — AND SO APT — IT COULD BE A LIFETIME MOVIE INSTEAD IT’S THE FOUNDATION FOR EVERYTHING THE NETWORK IS DOING TO INCREASE THE NUMBER OF WOMEN BEHIND THE CAMERA ON ALL OF ITS PROGRAMS

can’t just come to us with a group of thirty guys and two women, and say, ‘Well, those women weren’t right,’” Carrig explains. “You have to keep digging.” Even worse, she says, programmers would call agencies around town with a project in search of a woman director, “And they would say, ‘We don’t have any right now.’ That just can’t happen.”

That meant building a pipeline to access new talent. Lifetime set up a partnership with AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women. DWW had already provided them with a ringer: Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, co-creator of Lifetime’s game-changing series UnREAL, came out of DWW, as did her short film on which the series is based.

The ten graduates of 2015’s DWW were all guaranteed a gig at Lifetime. “It’s not like we’re throwing a dart at a board,” Carrig says. “There are all these women who are so hungry for the opportunity, and have been waiting in the wings, and have done their shadowing programs. Now it’s time to flip the switch.”

The DWW graduates went into the offices to present their reels and themselves. “We had the head of every channel, plus their programmers — I’m talking History, A+E, FYI, Lifetime — they were all in that room to hear what these women had to offer,” Lopez says.

your job, you move on,” she says — so she was unprepared for a call from Tessa Blank, DWW’s interim director, a few months later.

“Tessa told me that I should sit down, and then she choked back tears. I thought something terrible had happened,” Barrett says. She braced herself.

UnREAL The Auditions had been nominated for an Emmy. Not bad for her first job out of the gate. And now the gate is wide open.

WHEN BABY CALLS THE SHOTS

AMY BARRETT WAS THE FIRST DWW GRADUATE TO LAND WORK AS A DIRECTOR THROUGH THE INITIATIVE SHE WENT TO VANCOUVER TO DIRECT FOUR OF TEN WEBISODES OF UnREAL THE AUDITIONS WHILE ON SET SHE ALSO SHADOWED JANICE COOKE WHO WAS DIRECTING THAT WEEK’S EPISODE OF UnREAL “It was fantastic,” Cooke says. “She’s such a smart director; it was just a pleasure to share my information with her. Because of her education at AFI, she understood what I was talking about. She really got it.”

Barrett also shot behind-the-scenes footage of Cooke at work, which aired as interstitials during breaks in that episode. The same was done for the other female directors during their programs.

“What’s important to me is that you see their faces, you see them with cameras in their hands, you see them directing crews on set,” Carrig says.

For a historical comparison, consider the story behind Hidden Figures, the 2016 theatrical feature about African-American women who helped launch the U.S. into space. It’s not enough to do the work — recognition is critical.

As is trust. Barrett says, “They weren’t treating me like a student filmmaker whose hand needed to be held.” She came home more excited than when she left. “I figured out that I could do it. I had the tools to make the fast choices, to work on the fly, and I discovered I loved directing just as much [when] doing it for hire. It didn’t have to always be my material to bring that giddy feeling being behind the camera.”

After finishing her assignments, Barrett didn’t hear from Lifetime, which is the norm — “You do

Sara Rea and daughter Reese

SARA REA LOVES A CHALLENGE. She’s been executive producer and showrunner of Project Runway, a twelve-time reality-competition Emmy nominee, since it moved to Lifetime in 2008. She added its offshoot, Project Runway Junior, to her workload in 2015.

But 2016 presented a timely twist: after years of trying to conceive, Rea became pregnant. Her due date was expected two weeks into shooting Runway’s fifteenth season. “I wasn’t planning my pregnancy around dates,” she says. “I didn’t have that luxury.”

The show takes place in New York; Rea lives in Los Angeles. It was — say it all together now in your best Tim Gunn voice — a make it work moment. And she did make it work, with the full support of show producer Bunim/Murray Productions and Lifetime.

“The first person I told was our tech guy,” Rea says. He and his crew built a control room in her L.A. home, with monitors and a microphone to talk to the New York control room in real time. For remote shoots, the crew brought her along via iPad and Facetime. “They’d roll me around — I could look at the setup, and we’d talk through it.”

The workarounds were in place not a moment too soon; Rea’s daughter, Reese, decided to arrive early — two days into shooting. “It was flawless. I was able to have my baby, be a new mom and run the show from my living room, literally while nursing my child.” She didn’t even miss early conference calls, she says, “because at four in the morning in L.A., I was already up.”

As fantastic as the technology was, the support she got from the crew, talent and execs was even greater.

“I felt it. No one blinked an eye and said, ‘No, we’re going to find someone else,’ or, ‘No, you’re going to have to have your baby in New York,’ or any of that. It was almost like, ‘Let’s lead with the baby and we’ll figure out the show.’”

Rea’s time at the network long predates Broad Focus, but she feels she’s living the promise of the new initiative. “Lifetime is a very special place,” Rea says. “It really has nurtured and continues to nurture women in the workplace, and everything that comes with that.”

Including little Reese.—L.R.

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JAMES DITTIGER; JACK ZEMAN

hands of these filmmakers,” Carrig says. “Nobody else would have done it. Corporations would just sponsor TED and get their logos on it. Again, what’s important to me is that we put women to work.” (See “When Baby Calls the Shots,” page 35, for another example of Lifetime’s support for a woman behind the camera.)

Carrig also finds inspiration in the commitment of female series creators who are putting women to work on other networks and outlets. Ava Duvernay has hired women directors exclusively for her OWN show Queen Sugar, while Jill Soloway employs women and LGBTQ directors for her Amazon series Transparent. Melissa Rosenberg, showrunner of Netflix’s Jessica Jones, recently announced an all-female slate of directors for the show’s second season. Meanwhile, at 20th Century Fox, Ryan Murphy has launched a foundation dubbed Half, with the goal of filling 50 percent of the director slots on his shows with women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ community.

“My dream would be to have a scripted series that’s completely female-directed,” Carrig says. In fact, Lifetime does have one coming up, the series Mary Kills People, but it’s a bit of a cheat: Holly Dale directed all six episodes.

A veteran Canadian director, Dale has worked with Lifetime before, and she’s always found supportive collaborators there. “Sometimes you go in and you’re a shot collector. Here they want you to actually bring your creative stamp to the table,” she says.

On Mary Kills People, she adds, “I had wonderful producers and creators — Amy Cameron, Tara Armstrong and Tassie Cameron were my collaborative partners, and all the execs were women. I guess it’s because we all have a shorthand, and we understand each other as women, so it was a very joyful experience.”

It might sound corny, Dale adds, “But it is a sisterhood. It’s a different experience with a man — not that it’s a bad one. He’ll bring his sensibilities Top: Shiri Appleby and Constance Zimmer of UnReal; bottom, from left: Kellee Stewart, Meagan Good, Keri Hilson and (back to interpreting something, and you’ll bring yours. to camera) Kelly Rowland of Love by the 10th Date.

But there seems to be more of a coherent vision in “I was just at Lifetime yesterday, pitching a true-crime movie,” Barrett terms of perspective when it’s all women.” says. “I’m pitching something else to A+E. Doing the job and having it go well Tanya Lopez agrees. “We shot Love by the 10th Date, about a friendship opened up doors and helped me make relationships with some wonderful between four women. It was written and directed by a woman, it was execupeople at the company.” tive-produced by two women, it was line-produced by another woman. And I have to say, when I walked on the set in L.A., it was so cool. The set was very calm, very congenial. I’m not saying that can’t happen on any other set. But LIFETIME IS WORKING WITH A RANGE OF OTHER there was a moment when we went, ‘That is fantastic.’”

ENTITIES IT PROVIDES DISTRIBUTION FOR THE BENThe recent Beaches remake was similarly assembled: written by a womTONVILLE FILM FESTIVAL IN ARKANSAS WHICH PRESan, executive-produced by two women and directed by a woman, it centers ENTS WORK BY WOMEN AND DIVERSE VOICES WHILE on two women and their intense friendship. “It leads to some great conversaWALMART HANDLES THE DVD COMPONENT AMC tions on set,” Lopez says.

DOES THEATRICAL AND LIFETIME AND STARZ ARE Beaches director Allison Anders speaks just as highly about Lopez and BFF’S TELEVISION OUTLETS the other execs she’s worked with at Lifetime — who are all women. “My viBroad Focus recently shined its light on TEDWomen, too. Lifetime partsion is empowered by Lifetime,” she says. “That’s an incredible thing. Even nered with Chicken & Egg Pictures, a nonprofit that funds female documenthough I’m a director for hire, my vision is expected every step of the way.” tarians, to create short films to introduce each theme during San Francisco’s Much has improved for women filmmakers since 1987, when Anders diTEDWomen conference last October. rected her first indie film, Border Radio, but some areas still lag. “We prob“The reason that was so innovative was that we put the money in the ably had women outnumbering men in every department, even the camera

A FEW FOCUSED WOMEN

Nia Long and Idina Menzel in Beaches

First-timers and veteran filmmakers are among those benefiting from Broad Focus.

A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS, LLC

AMONG HER MANY CREDITS, NZINGHA STEWART has directed two movies for Lifetime, including With This Ring (one of the top five cable movies of 2015) and the upcoming Love by the 10th Date, which she also wrote. “Broad Focus not only allowed me to direct two feature-length films, but to write them as well,” at a time when almost no women are directing Hollywood features, Stewart explains. “This has opened the door to numerous opportunities and has created two strong calling cards in the industry by allowing me to show that I can direct feature-length films.” She was also hired to direct an episode of UnREAL, “helping me to build my résumé in episodic television — in which the percentage of women directors to men is only slightly better than in features.”

ACTRESS NATASHA BASSETT, who stars as Britney Spears in Britney Ever After, found working with the movie’s all-female production team inspiring. “It was a really exciting environment on this film and so enjoyable to be around that much female energy,” she notes.

“As we embarked on the journey of telling a modern feminist story about such an incredible woman’s rise to success, it was encouraging to feel as if that success was emulated through the team I was surrounded by.”

She adds that the experience has motivated her to create her own female-driven projects.

OSCAR-NOMINATED FILMMAKER DIANNE HOUSTON spent most of the last decade “unemployed and recovering from an unruly lap dance with cancer that hit me just as my two kids took their first steps,” as she so eloquently puts it. “Nine years later — stronger, broke and cancer-free — coming back into the workforce was mercilessly hard as a writer, and nearly impossible as a director. I was a triple threat: female, black and over forty. Past credits and accomplishments were virtually useless in a recession-fueled industry that unapologetically gave preference to young, white and male.”

Thanks to Broad Focus, she notes, “We are deemed desirable hires because of — rather than in spite of — who we are and what we bring to storytelling, to filmmaking, to the world.” Houston is a 2016 Writers Guild Award nominee for Lifetime’s Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge & Michel’le, and she’s now directing the network’s film Searching for Neverland.

ACTRESS KYRA SEDGWICK went to Lifetime to pitch a project as a producer. “As I sat in the meeting with Tanya [Lopez], she discussed Lifetime’s commitment to hire female directors,” Sedgwick recalls. “I had a project that I’ve been trying to get made for ten years, and in that very moment I realized I wanted to direct it myself!”

With Lifetime’s encouragement, women had key jobs on Sedgwick’s crew, including two coproducers, the screenwriter, first AD, costume designer and propmaster. “I gave a woman who had twenty-five years’ experience as an art director, working exclusively for men, her first production designer job,” she adds.

“The movie is called Story of a Girl, so I felt compelled to hire people that connected to that experience and know how challenging it is to be a girl.” —L.R.

department,” she says, but it was still hard to find a female DP. “And then you go in to do your final mix, and it’s all men. Why are there no women?

Do women not have ears?” When coming in to shoot an existing show, she finds Los Angeles crews have more women, while New York and Vancouver are often fairly macho bastions, both in numbers and attitude.

ANDERS’S EXPERIENCE POINTS TO YET ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE INITIATIVE BROAD FOCUS ALSO AIMS TO IMPROVE THE NUMBER OF WOMEN IN BELOW-THE-LINE JOBS LOPEZ SAYS “What we’ve found is there needs to be a lot more growth in the DP and the second AD [jobs].

We’re making headway in production designers.

We hire female editors — that’s getting easier, although it would be nice if there were more. The sound editors, we need to give more chances. It means taking a deep breath: okay, they’ve never done it before. Let’s do it. Let’s make sure they have ample time to prep. Let’s make sure they’re not being second-guessed in any way. That’s when failure happens, because people have the idea that you’re going to fail before you even start.”

Carrig adds: “There’s never going to be that perfect someone — at a certain point you have to take a chance.” And then surround them with experienced crewmembers.

One way to guarantee that is not just to hire women, but to hire them again. “We used director Nzingha Stewart on a movie called With This Ring. Then she directed an episode of UnREAL, then she directed the movie Love by the 10th Date,” Lopez says. “An opportunity for which I’m eternally grateful,” Stewart replies.

(See “A Few Focused Women,” left, for more on Stewart and other Broad Focus participants.)

Cooke, the director Barrett shadowed, has been directing since 2000, “which wasn’t that long ago, but it sure was a different climate,” she says. “It’s amazing to see where we’re going now.”

She adds that, thanks to Lifetime’s support, she’s getting pitched superior shows. Her first TV movie, the 2016 hit Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge & Michel’le, came about thanks to Broad Focus.

Since then, she’s been working nonstop. “This has helped my career tremendously. It’s totally put me on a different level.”

Broad Focus also reflects a change in the kind of programming Lifetime offers. Long known for its women-in-jeopardy scenarios, the network still offers everything from Stalked

by My Doctor to Stalked by My Mother. But with scripted shows like UnREAL, the damsels in distress have started rescuing themselves. And with movies like Deadly Adoption, they’re making fun of themselves as well.

It’s not a coincidence that women created those titles. “This is what the research is saying more and more, too: hire women and diverse voices to make that content, and all of a sudden you get those shifts in what you’re seeing on screen,” Carrig says.

The mandate isn’t limited to Lifetime. Dubuc is committed to transformation across all of A+E’s channels. “For us, it became, okay — how can we continue to support these directors in multiple areas?” Lopez says. “That’s what Broad Focus did: it made us much more hyper-focused and aware of what else we needed to get done.”

The industry is in a state of upheaval, and everyone’s looking for fresh voices. Lifetime is finding them. “I see it as the most rewarding and important thing, in terms of a legacy of what I can do in this industry,” Carrig says. “To put the seeds out there, and see it’s working.”

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You may know him as the multi-talented singer-songwriter who has

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE SCHOFIELD GROOMING BY MELISSA WALSH

won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and ten Grammy Awards.

But lately, John Legend has been getting accoladesforhisworkasaproducerofsocially conscious film and television. Part of that work is the acclaimed series Underground, which launches its ten-episode second season March 8 on WGN America.

Set in 1857, Underground is a gripping portrayal of the Macon 7, a group of slaves who, in season one, plotted a daring escape from a Georgia plantation via the secret network known as the Underground Railroad. Lavishly shot — and scored during season one with contemporary music by artists such as Kanye West and The Weeknd — the series satisfies Legend’s desire to tell inspiring stories and give voice to those who would otherwise remain unheard.

“There’ve been a lot of conversations about diversity in Hollywood,” Legend observes. “So many people want to see stories about people who look like them or their ancestors. We as producers have an opportunity to help those stories get made.”

Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Aldis Hodge (as escaped slaves) and Christopher Meloni (as a bounty hunter) head the ensemble cast.

The second season incorporates historical figures like humanitarian Harriet Tubman (Aisha Hinds), abolitionist William Still (Chris Chalk) and slave trader Patty Cannon (Sadie Stratton).

Legend, who serves as an executive producer, will also make a cameo appearance as Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became an esteemed social reformer and statesman. Of his role, Legend alludes only to a pivotal scene that “shows the level of organization and strategy that went into the abolitionist movement.”

In season two, those slaves fortunate enough to have made it

to freedom discover that their real journey is only beginning. “Getting to the North isn’t enough to keep them free,” Legend notes.

“There’s a lot of people left behind, and as long as those folks aren’t free, our characters won’t be satisfied.”

And while the slaves’ brutal existence makes viewing tough at times, “We don’t wallow in the misery of slavery,” Legend says. “We focus on the courage and boldness of those who dared to fight back.”

Sony Pictures Television produces Underground. In addition to Legend, the series’ executive producers include Misha Green, Joe Pokaski, Anthony Hemingway, Akiva Goldsman, Tory Tunnell, Joby Harold, Mike Jackson, Ty Stiklorius and Mark Taylor.

Get Lifted (the production company named for Legend’s debut album) has made a splash since its launch five years ago. The company produced the Obama date movie Southside with You and teamed with Whiplash director Damien Chazelle to produce the Golden Globe–winning and Oscar-nominated musical La La Land. In that film, Legend exuded effortless cool on screen as a bandleader who hires jazz musician Ryan Gosling. He also wrote the song he performs with Gosling, “Start a Fire.”

While Get Lifted continues to push forward on ambitious fronts — Black Wall Street, a series about black wealth in the early twentieth century, is in the early stages of development for WGN America — Legend says that music remains his top priority. With Ariana Grande, he recently recorded a new version of the Beauty and the Beast title song. He’s also gearing up for a tour to promote his latest album, Darkness and Light, which Legend says may be his most introspective.

“I wrote about fatherhood and being a husband,” he says.

“I wrote about what it means to struggle for justice and a better world. I tried to make music I felt good about.”

Poetic Justice As an actor-producer, John Legend turns to television to tell a tale of courage. BY GRAHAM FLASHNER TelevisionAcademy.com

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TV distribution goes topsy-turvy as traditional service providers encourage cord-cutting while the digital

PHOTOILLUSTRATION BY TODD REUBLIN

IT USED TO BE SO SIMPLE. On one side were the guys who sell you the cord — the telecommunications giants. You know, the cable operators like Comcast, Charter and Cox; satellite TV providers like DirecTV and Dish Network; and wireless companies such as AT&T and Verizon. These monoliths — collectively known as the pay-TV industry — deliver video via their proprietary networks to homes with pricey, leased set-tops. A van and a technician are almost always involved. These firms charge a lot for their services and are generally not popular with consumers.

On the other side, came the scrappy disrupters — the guys who help you cut the cord to that overpriced bundle of cable channels (most of which you don’t watch anyway). For a reasonable fee, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube and a range of other internet companies deliver movies and TV shows “over the top” of the traditional pay-TV services.

But a new set of so-called virtual pay-TV platforms — that live-stream your favorite networks to just about any device — is sending the bundle itself over the top, blurring the line between the cord providers and cord cutters.

These next-generation services are turning the TV distribution business upside down. Imagine: some of the biggest traditional pay-TV operators are now encouraging you to cut the cord, while some upstart streamers like Sony, Hulu and YouTube want to sell you a big bundle of channels.

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OW DID WE GET SO TURNED AROUND? WELL, STREAMING PAY-TV SERVICES HAVE BEEN ON THE SCENE FOR A COUPLE OF Q=9JK FGO$ OAL@ <AK@ K KDAF? LN 9F< KGFQ K HD9QKL9LAGF VUE BOTH LAUNCHING IN 2015.

BUT BUZZ STARTED BUILDING AROUND THE CONCEPT ONLY RECENTLY. Just after Thanksgiving, AT&T — which paid $49 billion two years ago to acquire DirecTV — launched its much-anticipated DirecTV Now virtual service.

For $35 a month, DirecTV Now customers can live-stream ESPN, AMC, TNT, USA, CNN, Fox News and about sixty other well-watched cable channels on almost any device they want. Consumers opting for the top of the four available tiers get more than 100 channels for $70 a month; the lineup includes broadcast networks ABC, Fox and NBC in select big markets, as well as channels from premium cable provider Starz Encore. AT&T is even producing some original programming for its streaming platform, which includes Taylor Swift concerts and original shows from Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine.

Customers can sign up for a free seven-day trial: no technician comes to the house, and there’s no electrical-power-gobbling set-top box to lease. The service can be canceled at any time, without having to make a phone call or ever being placed on hold. Customers who change their minds can sign right back up, just as they do with Netflix. With a prepayment of three months’ service, AT&T will throw in a current-generation Apple TV streaming box for free.

Another perk: perhaps because AT&T is trying to purchase HBO parent Time Warner Inc. for $85.4 billion, DirecTV Now is streaming HBO for a superlow $5 a month.

DirecTV Now is aimed at a niche market of consumers who don’t already subscribe to a traditional pay-TV service. “We believe there’s a market of approximately 20 million households,” explains Tony Goncalves, senior vice-president of strategy and business development for AT&T Entertainment Group. “It’s not only younger consumers. We’re looking to attract both cord-nevers and cord-cutters — those who want more choice and flexibility to access a premium-content bundle more tailored to their lifestyle.”

In background conversations, however, AT&T executives quietly predict that DirecTV Now will become the company’s primary pay-TV platform by 2020, displacing the traditional DirecTV satellite service, as well as AT&T’s legacy pay-TV platform, U-verse.

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To get there, DirecTV will have to overcome a lot of competition.

Its satellite TV rival, Dish Network, was actually the first company to launch a virtual service, introducing its $20-a-month Sling TV platform in February 2015. Since then, Sling TV has steadily grown and evolved, adding major cable and broadcast networks, lots of sports channels and nifty features like cloud DVR. Sony closely followed Sling TV into the market in 2015, with the debut of PlayStation Vue. Its four product tiers range from $40 to $65 a month; the premium level offers more than ninety channels, including CBS in about half the country, a major broadcast channel that is not available on either DirecTV Now or Sling TV. Sony is just the first company from outside the pay-TV ecosystem to package a live-streamed bundle of channels. The coming months will see the launch of Hulu’s live-streaming service, as well as Google’s entry into virtual pay-TV: YouTube Unplugged. Additional lower-profile entries, such as Vidgo, are also expected.

SLING TV HAS EMERGED AS THE MOST ECONOMICAL OF THE THREE MAJOR VIRTUAL SERVICES TO LAUNCH SO FAR, OFFERING ITS BASE “ORANGE” PACKAGE — MORE THAN THIRTY MAJOR CHANNELS, INCLUDING ESPN, CNN AND TNT — FOR $20 A MONTH, BUT ALLOWING STREAMING TO ONLY ONE DEVICE IN THE HOME AT A TIME. The major selling feature of nearly all of the virtual pay-TV services is skinny bundling — not forcing subscribers to take gobs of channels they don’t want, thus staying well below the $100-a-month price point that many traditional pay-TV services are now exceeding.

Dish emphasizes flexibility and choice in its bundling strategy, allowing Sling TV subscribers to add to the basic tier with $5- and $10-a-month “extra” packages. If you like sports but don’t want to load up on a lot of other channels, you can pay an additional $10 for “Sports Extra,” which will add

smaller ESPN channels such as ESPNU, ESPNews and ESPN Buzzer Beater to the flagship ESPN network already available in the core service. Regional sports channels like Pac-12 Network and SEC Network are also thrown in.

Broadcast channels are harder to come by. Sling TV offers NBC and Fox through its $25-a-month “Blue” platform, which allows multiple users in a home to stream simultaneously. But only users in select big markets like the New York, Los Angeles and Chicago metro areas — basically, where the networks own and operate their own stations — can receive live local feeds of NBC and Fox. For residents outside those areas, Sling TV offers network shows on demand.

If you want ABC, you have to pay $5 a month for the “Broadcast Extra” add-on package, which will also give you Univision and UniMás. But again, ABC is viewable only to Sling customers in owned-and-operated markets like New York, L.A., Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and Philadelphia.

DirecTV Now has similar limitations in its broadcast reach. And the situation will stay that way for both companies until they sign a complex array of broadcast retransmission licensing deals with the affiliate station groups of their respective network partners. It’s a challenge that has already discouraged big virtual pay-TV aspirants like Apple.

Meanwhile, just because a network’s live feed is available in a particular market doesn’t mean the channel has streaming rights to all programming, as subscribers to DirecTV Now, Sling TV and PlayStation Vue found out when they were blacked out from the Golden Globe telecast in January. (NBCUniversal hadn’t yet carved out streaming rights with show producer Dick Clark Productions.)

SO, HOW CAN A CONSUMER SIZE UP THE SERVICES? In terms of price, Sling presents a clear advantage over traditional payTV, as well as its virtual competitors. Its $40-a-month package incorporates all of the channels it has licensed, which includes popular outlets like AMC, NFL Network and NFL Redzone. Its bundling strategy — with color-coded platforms and add-on modules — can be confusing, but the company’s ability to offer essential channels at an affordable price has caught on. Dish hasn’t released much subscriber data, but most analysts peg the Sling TV customer count at around 1 million, which is impressive.

In channel offerings, Sony’s PlayStation Vue has the most straightforward bundling model of the top three. Its four tiers start at $40 a month, but each includes robust access to the Big Four networks. For example, Vue currently has coverage of CBS in nearly half the country. By the end of 2017, 75 percent of Vue’s national footprint will have access to CBS, according to the network.

Vue’s other advantage: it has offered a full-blown cloud DVR since it launched two years ago. Sling TV is only in the testing phase with its version, which is available to Roku users. AT&T says it has plans to add the service later on.

Vue’s price structure, however, presents an existential conundrum.

The premium tier features more than ninety channels, including HBO and Showtime. But at $75 a month, users might find better value — and more reliability — with traditional pay-TV services, something cable executives often point out.

RELIABILITY HAS BEEN A PROBLEM FOR THE MORE WIDELY USED SLING TV, WHICH WAS PLAGUED BY TECHNICAL PROBLEMS FROM THE START. EARLY ON, THE SERVICE SUFFERED FULL-FLEDGED MELTDOWNS DURING POPULAR LIVE EVENTS LIKE THE FINAL

>GMJ G> L@= F;99 E=F K :9KC=L:9DD LGMJF9MENT IN APRIL 2015 AND, THAT SAME MONTH, L@= K=9KGF%>AN= HJ=EA=J= G> @:G K GAME OF THRONES. Service interruptions are occurring less often at Sling TV these days, but issues remain. Frequent users have found that the service streams fairly well on PCs and devices like Roku. But until a recent software upgrade, it tended to buffer and crash on devices like Xbox One. “The problem is the way Sling TV approaches their product and the way they stream into the market,” says video market analyst Dan Rayburn, who curates the Streaming Media blog. “They have a different way of approaching their video ecosystem.”

As for DirecTV Now, AT&T chief technology officer Enrique Rodriguez acknowledged at January’s Consumer Electronics Show that the platform has endured some early bugs and crashes. “The problems were not as big as I expected,” he added.

But if their platforms aren’t as reliable as traditional pay-TV, the operators of DirecTV Now and Dish insist they’re not trying to replace those services.

Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch maintains Sling is merely a “complementary” service, not a substitute for traditional pay-TV, and is meant to be packaged with the likes of Netflix and broadcast TV antennas. “Our objective was never to be the one service that meets all your viewing needs.”

In January, Dish confirmed that approach with a hardware launch dubbed AirTV. The $99 device (which comes with a $50 credit toward Sling TV) includes a digital TV tuner that can pick up live feeds from local stations; consumers can also use it to stream SVOD services like Netflix.

But in marketing their services, Dish and AT&T strike a very different tone — one of disrupters trying to free consumers from the monthly shackles of cable.

Consider Sling TV’s “Take Back TV” campaign featuring tattooed tough guy Danny Trejo (“People say I’m scary.… Boo!” he says, laughing. “I say scary is finding out your cable bill just doubled to over a hundred bucks a month!”) Meanwhile, in his announcement of DirecTV Now, AT&T CEO Randall Stephens also noted the opportunity to take market share away from the big, bad cable companies.

It’s a questionable approach, given that AT&T is just as big, also scores badly in customer satisfaction surveys and offers pretty much the same products — TV, internet, phone and wireless — as cable giants Comcast and Charter.

But the TV universe keeps changing. With programming costs continuing to rise, cable companies are finding that providing broadband is more profitable. And smaller operators, like Phoenix-based Cable One, are pulling back from pay-TV. Comcast isn’t doing that yet — in fact, it’s made major investments in its advanced X1 video delivery system. But Comcast recently signed deals to let its X1 users stream both Sling TV and Netflix, with the services integrated into X1. Television is still profitable for Comcast, but in a not-too-distant future the company may let others do the program bundling and just focus on providing internet service.

Meanwhile, Hulu and YouTube — which until recently were encouraging consumers to ditch their bundles — are about to announce robust livestreamed selections of channels.

And so it goes. You may never have to lease a cable set-top box again.

But that doesn’t mean the TV distribution business has gotten any less bewildering.

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The personal touch comes naturally to SAG-AFTRA president Gabrielle Carteris as she works to improve the lives of her fellow union members. BY CRAIG TOMASHOFF

Running on Empathy PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROCCO CESELIN

T

HEY SAY THAT WHATEVER DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER. FOR GABRIELLE CARTERIS, THOUGH, IT’S MORE LIKE WHATEVER DOESN’T KILL YOUR CAREER MAKES YOU STRONGER. The former Beverly Hills 90210 star has dealt with plenty of setbacks during her thirty years as a professional actress — sexism, ageism, severe injury — but she’s channeling what she learned from those misfortunes into her new role as president of SAG-AFTRA. While it might be jarring to see good girl Andrea Zuckerman take on the tough job of fighting for actors everywhere, the transition makes perfect sense to those who know her best.

“I can’t think of anyone who’d be better to have in that seat than Gabrielle,” says former 90210 costar and close friend Luke Perry. “She’s been both served and disserved by our union throughout her career, and those experiences make her the right woman for the job.”

Adds former CAA partner Byrdie Lifson Pompan, another close friend: “She has so much energy and is so accessible and possesses a level of compassion you can cut with a knife. Her level of empathy is so palpable, I wasn’t surprised at all when she ended up in this position where she can help thousands of people.”

In fact, the only person who seems genuinely astounded that she is now in charge of one of the country’s most powerful labor unions is Carteris herself.

“If you’d asked me twenty-five years ago if I’d be doing this, I’d have said, ‘What are you talking about?’” explains the actress, now fifty-six. “I wasn’t even thinking about getting involved in the

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union back then. But then I started doing some work with the union and engaging with other members, and I loved the idea of paying forward and giving a voice to people who feel like they don’t have one.”

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ER INSPIRATION TO BECOME ACTIVE IN SAG CAME PARTIALLY OUT OF DESPERATION. In 2006, she was hurt while filming a scene for a television movie. She was fighting with another actor, who she says was more than a foot taller and “repetitively lifted me up by my neck.”

The encounter left her in pain, but it wasn’t until she was talking on the phone with her husband and realized she couldn’t smile that the severity of her injury dawned on her. A visit to the doctor revealed that she suffered from a movement disorder. Carteris feared she might end up permanently paralyzed.

“It happened in Canada, and since that’s where I’m from, I was one of the first people she reached out to,” recalls another 90210 alum, Jason Priestley. “She didn’t know whom to turn to, so I helped her with connections to attorneys and the unions up there. It was a very difficult situation for her — both the injury and the struggle to find help to deal with it. I think that experience did a lot to set her on this path, because she wants to make sure what happened to her doesn’t happen to other performers.”

Until that point, Carteris says she had been working non-stop and never quite realized or appreciated the union-member relationship. SAG stepped in to deal with Canadian officials to help get her appropriate health care. Watching as the union worked through the multitude of meetings

and depositions it took to make things right, Carteris could feel her life changing.

“I’d come home. I was deformed. My family had to take care of me. That’s when I really saw the benefit of being in the union,” she says.

“I could never have afforded the expense of my treatment without my SAG insurance. That was one less worry in a journey of struggle. The union took a very complicated situation in my life and uncomplicated it for me. That was when I could see how it’s hard for an individual to be heard — and much easier when you’re part of a collective.”

That experience, according to Pompan, required her “to really step outside of her comfort zone. She’d always been an advocate for others and put herself last, like a lot of women. This was the first time in a long time when she had to be an advocate for herself.”

U

NTIL HER INJURY, CARTERIS HAD BEEN BASKING IN THE SPOTLIGHT THAT COMES WITH STARRING IN ONE OF TELEVISION’S MOST POPULAR SERIES. She’d achieved the life she’d wanted since first grade, when she played a Christmas tree in her school’s holiday play. She didn’t go straight into acting, though. After high school, she accepted a scholarship to the San Francisco Ballet.

That didn’t last long — at five-foot-one, she wasn’t tall enough to survive as a dancer. Still eager to be on a stage, she went back to acting and soon began doing it full-time. Her first big role was in a 1987 CBS Schoolbreak Special. Little did she know how much that gig impressed one of her future costars, who happened to be observing her.

“I was living in New York City at the time, and my roommate got cast in the special and asked

HAIR AND MAKEUP BY ANTHONY PAZOS

At home with Gypsy

me to go with him to watch,” Perry recalls. “I watched Gabrielle work and thought, ‘Wow, she really has her shit together!’ At that point I’d never worked as an actor and didn’t presume to talk to her, but I’ll never forget watching her and seeing how serious she was about what she was doing.”

They wouldn’t formally meet until 1990, when they were both cast in 90210. The show became a big hit and turned Carteris into a TV star. After the series ended in 2000, she started appearing regularly in made-for-television movies and other series. Then, not long after her injury, she went to a union meeting to ask questions about a particular contract she didn’t understand. The explanation she received became what she now calls her “aha moment.”

“The explanation I got made so much sense,” she says. “I thought, ‘I want to help make things better for everyone else. I can be part of solutions instead of feeling like things have to happen just because they happen.’”

At the urging of friends, Carteris started attending some SAG board meetings. That led to running for positions on the SAG boards, and spending more time meeting other union members. Before long, she was a member of SAG’s national board of directors and president of AFTRA’s Los Angeles Local. The more union work she did, the more she enjoyed it — and the more respect she earned from her fellow members.

“I first met Gabrielle during a board meeting prior to merging with AFTRA, and the thing that struck me right away was her humility,” says David White, national executive director of SAG-AFTRA. “I recognized her from her 90210 days and knew she was famous, but she never presented herself that way. She was just another member of the board and saw herself as a key bridge-builder between SAG and AFTRA. She was always working hard to listen to others and learn more about every issue.”

White considers Carteris a “joyful and determined leader” for the union, in part because of “a deep, maternal, protective energy” she brings to the job. He’s had many conversations with her after she’s met with members to hear their concerns. “She is in real pain as she relates the stories she’s heard,” he notes. “You can seriously feel the pain in her voice as [we discuss] how to investigate the situation.”

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PPARENTLY, TO KNOW CARTERIS IS TO HAVE A SIMILAR STORY ABOUT HER EMPATHY AND COMPASSION. Perry, for instance, remembers talking with her during the 90210 days about what gift to get the crew. She told him, “Instead of spending money just to get them more clothes, let’s help a charity.” So they donated the gift money and credited the donation to each of the crewmembers.

Pompan has also seen the benefits of her friend’s generosity.

“When I lost both my parents and then my brother and then developed a brain tumor, she was an unbelievable friend and support system,” Pompan says. “There were so many nights when I’d be in the hospital with a dying loved one, and I’d look up and there she was. You know how the knee-jerk reaction in tough times is for people to say, ‘What can I do for you?’ in tough times? What makes Gab unique in those difficult situations is that she says, ‘You have a doctor appointment on Thursday, and I’m taking you.’ Now I try to remember that approach when I’m offering to help someone.”

Carteris admits she tends to take things personally when it comes to improving the lives of SAG-AFTRA’s 160,000 members. Which would explain many of her most important accomplishments with the union. White credits her with taking the lead in SAG’s efforts to end the decadeslong division between the two guilds’ movie and television performers and form a single union.

The accomplishment shows exactly how much her personal experiences as an actress influence her decisions as a union leader.

“One of my main motivating factors with the merger was to bring the health plans of both unions together,” she says. “I’d been a member of both. I’d worked for both. I knew firsthand that there were people making a living in both unions [as I was], but being split between two unions and therefore not getting full healthcare. So merging health plans was a major coup. I saw the benefit of this when I was injured. To have proper medical care is paramount.”

In 2012, Carteris’s efforts helped elevate her to executive vice-president of the consolidated unions, working with Ken Howard, the first elected president of SAG-AFTRA. Then, in March 2016, Howard died unexpectedly. Carteris was appointed as his temporary replacement. In October, she was officially elevated to the presidency with 79 percent of the union vote. Though devastated by the loss of her friend and boss, Carteris says she continues to practice what he preached: “Trust your instincts and don’t be afraid. He always said to be clear about what I believe but open to the idea that things might have to be different.”

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INCE ASSUMING THE PRESIDENCY, CARTERIS HAS APPLIED THOSE PRINCIPLES TO ANOTHER ISSUE THAT HAD AFFECTED HER OWN CAREER. Not long into her time on 90210, she had done a quick interview for a magazine story on one of her costars. The reporter asked for her age and she explained, “I don’t play age. I play character.” A few days later, though, she got a call saying the story would run with her age because the publication had found it through other sources. That’s how fans learned that this twenty-nine-year-old had fudged her age to land the part of a sixteen-year-old.

“When that story came out, I cried and cried, because I didn’t want to lose my job,” she says. “I was devastated and had a producer say, ‘You’re lucky we didn’t know your real age, because you wouldn’t have been hired.’ This fight isn’t about vanity. It’s about being able to make a living and work with dignity in whatever profession you choose, without feeling like you have something to hide. Age discrimination is real in our country. We need to break through that glass ceiling.”

Upon hearing that SAG had long been trying to change state laws to limit access to actors’ ages, she quickly leapt into action. “Gabrielle adopted that battle as her own,” White recalls.

“She believed in stopping ageism so badly that her work took her all the way up to having a key and persuasive conversation with [California] Governor Jerry Brown. She meant what she said to him, because she’d again personalized the fight by thinking of her own experiences and those of other actors she’s known over the years.”

Carteris worked with state legislators to craft a bill that would require entertainment and casting websites like IMDB to remove actors’ ages upon request. She insists the bill, which was signed into California law last fall, isn’t intended “to stop information flow.” Rather, she sees it as a way to create opportunities for actors to go in for roles that are younger as well as older than their actual ages.

She had the full support of union members, including the former costars who at first hadn’t been aware of how old she was. “Every actor I’ve talked to about what Gab’s done is very happy about it,” Priestley says. “Gab wears her heart on her sleeve, always very open about her thoughts and feelings and wanting to help. That’s what makes her a great orator — and why she’s a great leader for the union.”

Presiding over her fellow actors has become an all-encompassing job for Carteris, but she also insists on keeping her acting career alive, partly to stay in touch with what union members experience. Most recently, she had a recurring role on the CBS medical series Code Black. She still has the same passion for acting that she did while playing that Christmas tree. Which, in turn, feeds her passion for SAG-AFTRA. “I hope with my acting I’m being of service, because a great role can change a person’s thinking about something,” she says. “I love the ability to electrify people’s minds and move things forward. The work I do with the union is hopefully something more tangible. I see that in the letters I get all the time.

“Just yesterday, a man in his seventies wrote to say congratulations on taking over the presidency. He then said he’d been against the merger but wanted to tell me now how wrong he was. I like to think that we as actors can help shape our culture, so I’m grateful that others are so grateful.”

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Foundation Archive

[ Earl Hamner, Jr.]

N THE DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, THE SPENCER CLAN BEGAN TO GATHER. IT WAS A CUSTOM THAT AT THIS TIME DURING THE YEAR THE NINE SONS WOULD COME TOGETHER IN NEW DOMINION. ON THANKSGIVING EVE THEY WOULD CELEBRATE THEIR REUNION WITH FOOD AND DRINK AND TALK. ON THE DAY ITSELF THE MEN WOULD LEAVE AT DAWN TO HUNT FOR DEER. —SPENCER’S MOUNTAIN That opening passage in the 1961 novel

by Earl Hamner, Jr., would herald a watershed moment in the life of the author. Set in the Blue Ridge mountains of central Virginia, where he was raised, the sweeping coming-of-age story would spawn a feature film, a television movie and a beloved Emmy-winning television series, The Waltons, named outstanding drama series in 1973.

For Hamner, writing about life in those mountains came naturally.

“I think that in each of us, we bond somehow with land,” he would later say. “I think it comes from the fact that

our blood is spilled there. We fought wars on that land. Our sweat is in the soil. I think that permeates who we are. And there’s an unconscious falling back to that land. At least it is with me.”

The son of a machinist and a housewife, Hamner was the oldest of eight children. He began writing at age six and never dreamed of another career. After serving in the army during World War II, Hamner — who died in March 2016 — began his career when he won a radio script contest. Another winner in that contest was Rod Serling, who later bought some Hamner scripts

for The Twilight Zone.

The idea for Spencer’s Mountain came to Hamner while he was in the army and thinking about his family back home. President John F. Kennedy included the novel in a collection of books that he sent to world leaders to explain the best of American life.

In 2003 Hamner sat down for an interview with Jennifer Howard for the Television Academy Foundation’s Archive of American Television. The following is an edited excerpt from that discussion; the entire interview can be viewed at TelevisionAcademy.com/ archive.

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Foundation Archive

Q: What were your hobbies growing up?

A: Writing. That’s all I ever wanted to do from the time I was born.

Q: You began your career at a radio station in Cincinnati….

A: I was at a radio and television station called WLW, which is the flagship station of Ohio. I was a fledgling radio writer, and it was my first paying job. I was there for about two years, but all that while I kept wanting to go to New York and work. They said, “That’s the big time — you’ll never make it.” But I went, and I did make it.

Q: How did your job at NBC come about?

A: There was a writer there who had worked at WLW. He told me that as soon as they had an opening, they would hire me. So I became a staff writer at NBC in New York and had an office on the second floor overlooking the Rockettes’ dressing room. The Rockettes have no modesty and they kept running in and changing costumes. So I would be at my typewriter and looking up, and there would be naked ladies across the way. It was quite a distraction. I had more guests in my office than anybody.

Q: How did you come to write for The Twilight Zone?

A: I had a couple of ideas that I thought would work. I thought, “Even though I’m a homespun kind of writer, maybe having met Rod Serling earlier, maybe he would consider them.” I sent two ideas to Rod, and he called a few days later and bought both scripts, 50 EMMY

Jennifer Edwards and Michael Redgrave in Heid i

, I sent for my family and I was never without work again.

Q: What kind of feedback have you gotten on your Twilight Zone episodes?

A: When they were being rebroadcast at midnight, I would get calls from people saying, “Earl, turn on the television. One of your Twilight Zones is on.” I didn’t mind that. I’ve run into younger people who — if they’ve learned that I’ve done Twilight Zone — are interested because they think of me as Mr. Walton: “How could you also do Twilight Zone?”

Q: In the late 1960s you wrote the television movie Heidi….

A: Heidi was a lovely thing to do. It was a children’s classic, but they were visionary enough to say, “Let’s try to enlarge the story so that it

will appeal to more than just children.”

There was an interesting side story with Heidi. There was a game between the Oakland Raiders and the New York Jets on NBC and it ran over the time it was allotted. Heidi had been assured to start at a certain hour, so the network interrupted the final moments of the game and put Heidi on. All across the country there were these terribly offended sports fans who did not want to see a little girl in the Swiss Alps. They jammed the switchboard at the network and caused a huge outcry. But it was all kind of fun. It was the first time that I felt in competition with a football team and I won!

The Waltons began with the novel Spencer’s Mountain. What was the genesis of that story?

A: Spencer’s Mountain was based on a dream that my father had. It was always is dream to build a house for my mother. t was white. It had green shutters. It sat in specific place; it looked out on a specific iew. It was something that he wanted to do ecause he loved my mother.

I remember when the idea came to me at this would make a book. I was in a little wn south of Paris during WWII, living in a p tent on the grounds of a chateau, when l of my mail caught up with me. And in one ter my mother said, “Your daddy is out of rk. But he says he’s going to start work on house.”

So there I was in the army, far from home, esick and scared, because I knew I was ng to die. That vision of my father building house came to me. I had been writing in re moments, mainly short stories. And ught, “There’s a book there.” That was the first inkling that I would write Spencer’s Mountain. When I finally finished the book and it was published, it became a bestseller.

It was sold to Warner Bros. as a film, and it got wonderful reviews.

Q: In 1971 you wrote the TV movie The Homecoming….

A: I also wrote The Homecoming as a book, only about 125 pages. It described a Christmas Eve when my father was working in a distant town and he was late coming home. My mother sent me to look for him.

It was 1935, I think, and the book describes some of the adventures that I had that night and some that I invented. But it ended with my father coming home and bringing presents for everybody. There was a revelation in the book that the young man — me — wanted to be a writer.

CBS/PHOTOFEST; NBC/PHOTOFEST

Q: How did your childhood in Virginia influence you as a writer?

A: Well, let me quote something that I wrote once in a Waltons script: “There is something in us that tells us all we will ever know about ourselves — where we will be born, where we will live and where we will die. Some people cannot breathe unless they are close to the misted salt air of an ocean. Others suffocate unless they are in the dry, desert air. My people were drawn to mountains. We came there 200 years ago, and we endured war and pestilence and conflict and disease. But we lived and we worked and we prevailed.”

I think that feeling is what has affected all of the writing I’ve ever done. The fountain of my inspiration has been the place where I was born and the family that I was born into.

James Best, Laura Devon and Anne Francis in The Twilight Zone’s “Jess-Belle”

CBS/PHOTOFEST

Q: Since characters in The Homecoming were based on your own family, how difficult was it to cast the actors?

A: It wasn’t difficult because every actor was perfect for the role. Patricia Neal had this down-to-earth, intelligent, bright quality that I wanted to be reflected in my mother. Andy Duggan was very expressive as my father. The grandparents, Ellen Corby and Edgar Bergen, were quite marvelous.

And the children were especially good.

A casting agent named Pam Polifroni cast all the children. We only looked at them once and said, “Yes, wonderful.” But I was most thrilled to get Richard Thomas for the role of John-Boy. As it turned out, he was perfect.

Q: Why did you choose the last name Walton?

A: When I sold my book to Warner Bros., they claimed, rightly so, that they had bought all rights to it, including the names. Because Spencer’s Mountain was still viable as a film, they asked us to change the name of the family and the characters’ names.

There had been some Waltons in my family, way back. I thought the name sounded sturdy and Virginian and American, and it proved to be workable. It was one of those things where everything fell into place nicely.

All the parts made a perfect whole.

Q: How did The Homecoming lead to the series The Waltons?

A: The chairman of the board of CBS saw the movie and was moved by it. He wanted to see it as a series, so the people in The Homecoming became The Waltons.

Richard Thomas and Patricia Neal in The Homecoming: A Christmas Story

typecast; it was limiting his future to be so identified as this one character of John-Boy. I was desolate to lose him, but I think it was best that he move on.

Q: Why were some of the lead roles recast for the series?

A: We didn’t think that Patricia Neal, because of her health, had the strength to do a series.

We didn’t even offer the role to her. And later we learned that she would have taken it. Once we had cast Michael Learned in that role, then we had to cast a man that would be more approximate to her age. It was all a matter of matching, and keeping those that we felt were too valuable to lose, like Ellen Corby.

We kept every one of the kids. They had already proved their ability, and their looks were right. I don’t think Richard wanted to do television, but he liked the role.

Q: And there were other major cast changes….

A: It gradually sapped the energy of the show.

We dealt with Ellen Corby’s illness in an interesting way. She’d had a stroke, and when she was ready, we brought her back. It was an incredible comeback because she couldn’t do dialogue. But we wrote a script in which she had two words, and the scene was quite beautiful.

She’s sitting on the front porch and she sees Olivia [Michael Learned] making snap beans and wants to help. She wants to be needed. But she tries to help and she drops the bowl. So she becomes sulky, and finally Olivia says, “Grandma, what’s the matter with you?”

And Ellen, as best as she could speak at that time, says, “Neeeeeed me.” It was a terrible cry of a person who wants to be useful in the world and who’s been relegated to uselessness.

Every character was part of that whole piece. We gradually lost the strength, the sap, the blood of the series.

Q: How did the series handle cast changes over the years?

A: Richard Thomas left at the end of the fifth year — I think it was because he was getting

Q: Was John-Boy’s leaving an emotional moment for you, personally?

A: He provided us with an episode in which I wrote in some of my own feelings when I

left home for the last time to go to New York, which is what his character was doing. He was standing at the edge of the Walton porch and looking up at the moon and he says, “You know, the same moon is looking down on New York.” And the grandfather says, “I think a bird is about to fly from the nest.”

Richard is such a gifted actor that you could see the sadness of this farewell, the excitement of the new world, the place he’s going — all of these things came out in his face.

It was a very moving moment to me because it brought back so much of my own feelings.

Q: How did you come to narrate the series?

A: When we came back from shooting in the Grand Tetons, we started looking for a narrator. We auditioned everybody in town who does that kind of work professionally. At one point [director] Fielder Cook said, “What we need is somebody who sounds as homespun and corny as Earl.” So he said, “Read this paragraph.”

I read a paragraph, something about, “My father had been dead now, but my mother still lived alone in the same house. We were still a close family and saw each other when we could, and when we did it was a wonderful thing.” I looked over at Fielder and there were tears coming down his face. He said, “You son of a bitch, you made me cry. You’ve got the job.”

Foundation Archive

Q: Let’s move on to Falcon Crest, a series you worked on in 1981….

A: I had read an article in Time magazine about the wine industry — how it was growing; how we, as a people, were developing a taste for wine. It sparked an idea. So I went up to the Napa Valley and spent a wonderful weekend.

I was captivated by the food, the wine, the people and the valley itself.

I came back, created some characters and told producer Lee Rich about it. Lee was the salesman; he always knew how to go to a network, what to say to them. Lee went to CBS and I made the pitch, and he sold it to the network.

We started casting and were able to get Jane Wyman, Susan Sullivan and Bob Foxworth. And, of course, we had Lorenzo Lamas and Ana Alicia. They provided one of my favorite moments on the series: their characters had just been married and after the minister says, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” she turns to him and says, “I’m pregnant.” And he says, “Oh?” And she says, “But it’s not yours.”

That’s a key to the wickedness that we did.

akin to what we saw on the show. I had one woman say, “That was just the way I wanted to be. I always wanted to be a Walton.”

Q: How much creative control did you have over the show?

A: There were a good many producers and, a few years in, I was beginning to tire of it.

Eventually I left at the end of the fifth year; I felt that I had contributed as much as I could. After that it became sort of a cult thing. I know some people looked at it to laugh, because it became totally ridiculous. I never watched it again.

Q: In 1973 you wrote the script for the film version of Charlotte’s Web….

A: That was one of the happiest scripts I ever wrote. I loved the book from the first time I read it. I also loved the writer, E.B. White. I respected him greatly.

The script was done at Hanna-Barbera. I’ve written several adaptations, and I always go by the same advice that they give to a young doctor: “First, do no harm.” I try to be faithful to the first writer’s work, his intention and his talent.

Having such respect for him, I didn’t plan to change a thing. But there was a family of geese, and they just live in the barnyard in the

Q: What is your favorite show that you worked on?

A: Charlotte’s Web, probably. Because Charlotte’s Web is really about friendships. It’s about regeneration. It’s about the spiritual side of people. It’s about animals that I love. But mostly it’s about help, hope and the fact that we can all do something for each other.

Not long ago I heard a quote from Mother Teresa, which I thought was wonderful. It said, “Not many of us can do great things, but we can all do small things with love.” I’ve done a lot of small things, and I put a lot of love into them. And that makes me feel good.

Earl Hamner, Jr., and Richard Thomas

Q: How did the “Goodnight, John-Boy” trademark closing come about?

A: That was something we actually did when I was growing up. We would say goodnight to each other all over the house. Sometimes we’d get carried away and we’d say so many goodnights that my father — who had to get up early in the morning — would say, “All right, that’s enough.”

Richard Thomas, after his first trip to Virginia, came back and said, “I always wondered how you people could say goodnight and be heard. But then I saw the house, and it’s such a little cracker box that now I understand.”

Q: Why do you think the show resonated with viewers?

A: I think it was very simple — we all belong to families and we remember events that are 52 EMMY

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script. I added a little goose who doesn’t know how to swim, named Jeffrey. And the geese, like their mother, always speak in threes.

Jeffrey’s mother called him, “Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Jeffrey. We’re going to go swimming, swimming, swimming.” She was played by Agnes Moorhead. I loved the script and was pleased that Mr. White trusted me enough with his work.

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Academy Foundation

A Valiant Voice With her generous gift, a Simpsons star speaks up for the future of the industry.

Yeardley Smith

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n Yeardley Smith won an Emmy for outstanding voiceover, for her performance as Lisa, the whip-smart middle child of Fox’s The Simpsons.

But after that, she admittedly lost touch with the Television Academy — until last year. In June, at the opening of the Saban Media Center on the Academy’s campus in L.A.’s NoHo Arts District, Smith found herself so inspired that she ultimately made a transformative gift to the Academy Foundation’s New Destination Campaign.

The effort, which helped raise funds to build the media center, also supports the education and preservation programs of the foundation.

“Unless you are going to start a school yourself,” the actress says, “it’s difficult to support budding actors, writers, directors — people who want to get into the industry and don’t necessarily have the resources or a place to go to learn these crafts. I thought, This really ticks a box for me.”

Smith’s unrestricted donation will generate income to benefit the highest areas of need for the foundation.

“I always give unrestricted,” she explains. “If I believe in the organization, I trust [its representatives] to put the money where it needs to go.”

While it can be glamorous to make a contribution that directly impacts the frontlines, the Simpsons star values work done behind the scenes.

“I’m all about supporting the whole entity,” she says. “Somebody has to put the mortar in the bricks.”

For Smith, part of the appeal of the campaign was the emphasis by the foundation on preserving television’s past through its significant collection of interviews with television luminaries. “Preserva-

tion is very important to me. I’ve benefited a lot from hearing my predecessors’ stories.”

The actors who’ve inspired her, she says, include Jane Fonda, “who has been remarkably candid about her journey as a person and an actress. Lily Tomlin is a legend and an icon. And I’ve always admired Jean Smart and Betty White.”

Fittingly, the studio in the Saban center where the foundation conducts interviews with TV legends now bears Smith’s name.

“I’m delighted that my gift would give me a little legacy like that,” she says. “I have a real love for life stories.”

“Given Yeardley’s passion, it is especially fitting that her generosity will impact the journeys of so many aspiring television professionals,” notes Karla Loor Kitchel, the foundation’s senior director of strategic partnerships.

Growing up, Smith didn’t have a mentor. “I flew blind,” she says, adding that she would have loved to have been able to participate in the foundation’s internship

program as a youth.

Her advice for those looking to enter Hollywood? “Show up on time,” and don’t shy away from adding additional skills to your r«sum«. “Nowadays, it’s all about being a multi-hyphenate: actorwriter, actor-director, actor-writerdirector — it’s helpful to get your finger in another pie.”

But expanding her own reach hasn’t come easy, she admits.

“There’s a nasty little troll inside me and most creative souls I know, and it wants to get the better of us as much, as fast and as often as it can.

You have to learn to overcome it — or not to let it win every time.”

In a recent push past her comfort zone, Smith teamed with Ben Cornwell to launch a boutique development company, Paperclip Ltd. “We develop projects in any medium, at the earliest stages,” she explains. “We want to be the people who are able to say yes first.” The firm has eight new projects in house, two of which will feature the Simpsons star.

Besides the iconic Fox show,

Smith has appeared in films such as City Slickers and As Good As It Gets; she’s also had her own one-woman show off-Broadway, More. A painter and writer, she has published a children’s book, I, Lorelei.

Of her TV work, she looks back fondly on her role as Greg’s crabby secretary on Dharma & Greg. But the mere mention of Lisa Simpson brings the biggest smile to her face, especially when she’s reminded that she’s been voicing Lisa for twenty-eight years — “thirty if you count The Tracey Ullman Show!”

Smith chirps.

“Lisa Simpson is one of the best characters ever created in the history of entertainment,” she proclaims. “I would say that even if I didn’t do her voice.”

Though she’s looking forward to her future endeavors, she’s going to be devastated when The Simpsons comes to an end. “It will be like one of my very best friends in the world has moved away and is never coming back. I will be in a fetal position!”

—Nicole Pajer

Me and My Emmy Michael Polito How He Got the Gold: All of his wins were for picture editing: Lady Gaga Presents: The Monster Ball Tour at Madison Square Garden on HBO (2011); The 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert on HBO (2010); The Kennedy Center Honors (1997, ’99, 2006) on CBS. Now for the Noms: Eight additional editing nominations for The Annual Academy Awards (2000–’07), five more for The Kennedy Center Honors (1996, ‘98, ’03, ’09, ’10), four for AFI Life Achievement Award specials (’04, ’08, ’09, ’14) and more for specials starring or celebrating Janet Jackson, Barbra Streisand and Elizabeth Taylor. Still more for HBO’s Thurgood (2011) and For Our Children: The Concert (1993).

Real Appeal: “Being able to collaborate with the best producers, directors and camera men and women in the business has given me the opportunity

to give and receive feedback, which has been an enormous benefit in the edit room.”

Hear, Hear: “It’s most important to listen. My primary job is to help bring the vision of the producers, director and talent to the screen. I always take in as much information and emotion from them as possible, so I can deliver that final picture.”

Sold on Gold: “I have been fortunate enough to work on the Oscars for a number of years. It still makes me proud to have been in that production meeting with the likes of Don Mischer, Laura Ziskin and Gil Cates, listening to the giants of our community developing ideas for that show.”

Emmy Memory: “One year I had the opportunity to bring not only my wife to the event, but also my children. They have sacrificed a lot with me being absent from their lives. For them to get to share that moment was very special.”

COREY NICKOLS

Primetime Emmy Tally: Five

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