6dfvdfv

The Big Short

Episodes, seasons and commercials get snipped

WILD RIDE

Driven to distraction on Amazon’s Grand Tour

MINORITY REPORT

Assessing TV’s treatment of the largest minority (it’s not what you think)

Free and Claire

She’s every inch a monarch on Netflix’s The Crown, but Claire Foy owns up to an inner maverick

The Globes at 75

Who’ll get the golden glow?

B E S T C O M E DY S E R I E S O U T S TA N D I N G E N S E M B L E I N A C O M E DY S E R I E S “BLACK-ISH ... IS A GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING.” EW.COM

TUESDAYS 9|8c #blackish

“ALMOST PERFECT TELEVISION” —THE ATLANTIC

“ONE OF THE BEST SHOWS ON TV” —BUZZFEED

contents emmy® The Magazine of the Television Academy Volume XXXIX, Number 10

36

6 WELCOME From the chairman

Features 30 All Claire As Elizabeth II in Netflix’s The Crown, Claire Foy brings warmth and vulnerability to a role that could easily seem cold. Says a costar: “That’s a remarkable feat to watch.”

By Tatiana Siegel Photographs by Ryan Pfluger/August 36 When Wrong Makes Right The prospect of imminent calamity keeps viewers tuning in to Amazon’s The Grand Tour, with everyone’s three favorite petrolheads.

By Benji Wilson 40 The Big Short Why are episodes, seasons and even commercials all taking a haircut these days?

By Daniel Frankel Illustration by Lou Brooks

44 Map to the Stars “They always put at least one person on the map,” Gina Rodriguez says of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awarded her a Golden Globe in her show’s first season. Now known for its prescient picks and not just its great parties, the group will be back at the Beverly Hilton for its seventy-fifth gala.

By Craig Tomashoff 58 Season of Change To spark change in the industry, a philanthropy challenged creators to audition and cast more actors with disabilities. The results are in, and they’re… underwhelming. But activists, producers and others are striving to dispel the myths surrounding persons with disabilities.

By Libby Slate

For the very best in television... Subscribe to 4 EMMY

8 IN THE MIX BIO PICK: Virginia Gardner of Hulu’s Runaways, Letitia Wright of Netflix’s Black Mirror FACE TIME: Chris Carter still seeks answers in The X-Files; Brit Sam Bain explores Ill Behaviour FEST ZEST: Sundance: it’s not just for features anymore NETWORK NEWS: Spike rebrands as Paramount; Funny Or Die gets new digs at IFC DARING DOC: Retracing Teddy Roosevelt’s risky Amazon ride TRENDING: Stars go to Knight school; on Star Trek: Discovery, Klingons find their voice 52 FOUNDATION INTERVIEWS TV scholar Horace Newcomb 60 ACADEMY NEWS Engineering Awards wrap Emmy season; eleven enter Hall of Fame 64 ME AND MY EMMY Makeup artist Patti Ramsey Bortoli

. Visit emmymagazine.com

On the cover: Claire Foy of Netflix’s The Crown photographed by Ryan Pfluger/August

© 2017 EPI E XE Entertainment m LL All Rights LLC. g Reserved. EPIX® iis a ste ed stere d tra ademar demar k of EPIX E IX Enter E t tainm i ment LLC. Get Shorty © 2017 MGM Television Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

CHRIS O DOWD RAY ROMANO

YOU RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR NEXT HIT.

WATCH ALL EPISODES NOW AT EPIX.COM

welcome THE MAGAZINE OF THE TELEVISION ACADEMY televisionacademy.com

I’m also thinking back on the many wonderful events the Academy ed in 2017, like Words + Music, Story TV and conversations with Bob rt and Tyler Perry — the latter marking our first membership event In addition, we invited members to professional development

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 Executive Director, Television Academy Foundation: Jodi Delaney Public Relations Representation: breakwhitelight Legal Counsel: Alan J. Epstein, Esq., and Jeffrey S. Tenenbaum, Esq., Venable LLP

panels, networking mixers and more.

And I continue to marvel at the talent and professionalism on display in the creation and production of our award shows, from the College Television Awards and Television Academy Honors to the Los Angeles Area Emmys, Creative Arts Emmys and, of course, the Emmy Awards telecast, plus the Engineering Emmys. As this issue of emmy goes to press, we are preparing for what is sure to be a thrilling Hall of Fame gala on November 15 (look for highlights and photos on our website).

As I remarked during the Emmy broadcast on September 17, increasing inclusion in our industry is a key priority of the Academy. We all know that much more progress lies ahead, but I am proud of the strides we have made, both as an organization and as an industry. From the nominations announcement to all our Emmy shows, we’ve celebrated inclusion throughout this awards season.

We saw, for example, Donald Glover (of FX’s Atlanta) and Lena Waithe (of Netflix’s Master of None) earn Emmys (well, Donald won two!), marking important industry milestones for persons of color as well as the LGBTQ community. And the A&E series Born This Way, a reality series starring seven young adults with Down syndrome, won two Emmys out of six nominations.

The effort to expand opportunities in our industry for persons with disabilities happens to be well documented in this issue (see “Season of Change” on page 48). As Television Academy member and longtime disability advocate Tari Hartman Squire notes in the story, “Media, particularly television, has the power to shatter myths or reinforce stereotypes. When it comes to disability, that’s very powerful.”

Unfortunately, much of the recent news about our industry — or, more accurately, the media industry as a whole — has been disturbing. This fall, we have heard reports about sexual harassment and sexual assault allegedly committed by prominent media figures.

I wish to restate our position on this subject: the Television Academy believes that sexual harassment and sexual assault are abhorrent and totally unacceptable. We deeply empathize with those who have been affected and stand united in speaking out against harassment in any and all forms.

We at the Academy understand that as television continues to evolve, so does our organization. We remain, of course, the home of the premier award for honoring excellence in our medium. But our role is also as a thought leader and as an advocate for our members, from the set to the executive suite.

These are significant responsibilities, and we take them very seriously. For this reason and many others, I am humbled to serve this organization and the industry that means so much to all of us, and am grateful for the opportunity.

Board of Governors: Eric Anderson, Eva Basler, Stuart Bass, A.C.E., Gary Baum, Ted Biaselli, Bob Boden, Bob Bronow, C.A.S., Sue Bub, Kathryn Burns, 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 D. 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, Mandy 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

Hayma Washington Chairman and CEO Television Academy

Executive Committee: Hayma Washington, chairman; Allison Binder, Jill Daniels, Susanne Daniels, Madeline Di Nonno, Mark Gordon, Gail Mancuso, Rickey Minor, Susan NessanbaumGoldberg, Shonda Rhimes, Frank Scherma, Mark Spatny, Steve Venezia, C.A.S., Mitch Waldow, Richard Weitz, Carmi Zlotnik

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

Volume XXXIX, Issue #10, 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.

6 EMMY

RON RINALDI

he year comes to a close, I can’t help but think of the traordinary people who make this job such a pleasure d a privilege. In collaboration on various Academy itiatives, I have met and worked with many new olleagues while also strengthening long-standing lationships.

Editor-in-Chief: Juan Morales Editor: Gail Polevoi Managing Editor: Maura Weber Associate Editor: Sarah Hirsch

in the

BIO PICK

Born This Way

“It’s really cool because she appears to be someone she’s not,” Gardner says. “She seems like this perfect church girl with a perfect life from a perfect family. But the more you get to know her, the more human she seems.”

Or superhuman, in this case.

“My superpower is I get to fly, and that’s literally everybody’s dream,” the actress says. Yet Gardner has no trouble keeping her feet on the ground. “I’m from Sacramento, and whenever I told anyone I was moving to Hollywood, they would pat me on the shoulder and say, ‘Good luck, kid.’ When I started getting cast in shows, people were like, ‘Oh, you’re really doing this! I’m sorry I was really condescending for your entire childhood.’”

Guest gigs on Glee and The Goldbergs led to her breakout role in Michael Bay’s found-footage sci-fi drama, Project Almanac, and she soon found herself reading for a top-secret Marvel project. “I tested for the role,” she recalls, “and afterward the director said, ‘If I were you, I’d start reading the Runaways comics.’ It went from there.”

In the first episode — released November 21, along with episodes two and three — Karolina and her high-school classmates find out their parents are secret villains and they must summon their inner superpowers to fight evil. That process of self-discovery resonates with Gardner.

“I relate to my character, and I think everybody can,” she says. “When I first moved to L.A., I had this image of what I thought people here needed to look or act like. I noticed there was a big shift in my career when I stopped trying to please everybody else and tried to be true to who I am.” —Bruce Fretts

TRACEY MORRIS

superhero hiding a secret identity is hardly an earthshattering premise. But for Virginia Gardner, there’s a twist: her character, Karolina Dean in Hulu’s Runaways, is Marvel’s first gay superhero.

V I O L A

D A V I S

LEAD ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES

“STUNNING. VIOLA DAVIS BRINGS HER A-GAME.” TVLINE

THURSDAYS 10|9c #HTGAWM

in the

mix

Training in medieval armor bonds cast and crew on Knightfall.

IGHTCLUB

The first time the stars of History’s Knightfall dressed in chainmail for a screen test, they were stunned by its heft.

“I couldn’t pull my sword out of my belt because I couldn’t lift my arm,” recalls Tom Cullen, who later weighed the costume and discovered he was wearing about fifty pounds in full chainmail — with thick tunic and armor — and around thirty-five pounds the rest of the time.

But authentic costumes were de rigueur for the series, about the Knights Templar, a Catholic military order that grew in power in the twelfth century but met an unfortunate end: King Philip IV of France persecuted the group and had many members arrested in 1307 and burned at the stake. The tenepisode tale debuts December 6.

Fortunately for Cullen — and his costars Pádraic Delaney and Simon Merrells — the production provided an intensive boot camp, on set at Barrandov Studios in Prague, in the Czech Republic. They even trained in chainmail to get used to moving under its restrictive weight.

“It was quite a lot of work, but we gave them strength and endurance,” says Cedric Proust, the stunt coordinator. “During prep, they were doing a normal workout in the morning, warming up, and then boxing for about an hour or an hour and a half. Then they did between two and three hours of 10 EMMY

swordfighting, broke for lunch, and then one or two hours on horseback.”

That’s not all. “Then we’d come back and do weights,” Cullen adds. “That was our day, for two weeks. It was a really intense regime. And we made sure we kept up that regime as much as possible during filming.”

Proust prefers having actors perform their own stunts when possible. “We were prepping fights with doubles, with the stunt guys,” he explains. “Then I showed [the choreography] to the actors or gave them a video so they could learn new fights.” The stars’ stunt doubles — Faycal Attougui for Cullen, Jakub Bobuski for Delaney and Josef Jelinek for Merrells — helped with tutoring.

Cullen was on set virtually every day of the seven-month shoot — the Welshman left once for a wedding and once for a funeral. Not surprisingly, the actors and stuntmen formed tight bonds.

“We worked together to improve and hone our skills,” he says. “It was great to have [Attougui] on set — he was watching every movement I made and gave me notes on every sword stroke.”

As difficult as it was wearing — and training in — chainmail and muslin tunics through extreme heat and cold, the result was worth it. The show “looks amazing,” Cullen says. “The costumes made us move in a specific way, which makes it look authentic.” —Paula Hendrickson

LARRY HORRICKS/HISTORY

In tunics and chainmail: (from left) Pádraic Delaney, Guy Lewis, Simon Merrells and Sam Hazeldine

F O R YO U R C O N S I D E R AT I O N B E S T C O M E DY S E R I E S O U T S TA N D I N G E N S E M B L E I N A C O M E DY S E R I E S

“The

Best New Comedy of the season.”

E! Online

TUESDAYS 9:30|8:30c #TheMayor

in the

mix The Sundance Festival is screening more TV — and offering would-be creators another way into Hollywood.

Not Just for Features Anymore

The Jinx O.J.: Made in America

Perhaps there’s no better sign of television’s cultural ascendancy than a quick glance at the annual Sundance lineup.

For the past four years, the epicenter of independent film increasingly has become a showplace for smaller-screen fare. In 2013, the festival raised eyebrows when it launched Jane Campion and Gerard Lee’s series Top of the Lake with a single seven-hour showing. Just like that, it ushered in a new era of binge watching at the most venerable American film venue.

“It was an experiment for us: how is this going to feel at a film festival, watching it all in a theater?” says Trevor Groth, the festival’s director of programming. “People loved it. We got such great feedback from Jane Campion and then the audience. That really opened our eyes, and we said, ‘Hey, this is interesting.’”

As disruptive as that may seem to cinema purists, it also makes sense.

Since Robert Redford launched the Utah-set festival in 1978, Sundance has been dedicated to compelling storytelling. It had already expanded its scope by creating a theater lab two decades ago. Television became a natural extension and a signal of the blurring lines of mediums. Over the past four years, the slate began to reflect the evolution, with such content debuting as Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience and Ezra Edelman’s five-part miniseries O.J.: Made in America, which went on to win two Emmys and an Oscar.

Less than a year after Top of the Lake unspooled in Park City at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, Sundance bolstered its TV commitment by launching an episodic lab, giving fellows an opportunity to develop series and pilot scripts with guidance from Hollywood producers and executives. In so doing, it created a path for the next Soderbergh or Jill Soloway to bypass the traditional TV creator route and instead mimic the prototypical film auteur 12 EMMY

who uses Sundance to eschew the studio system.

“What I’ve seen in our lab is a really focused artist who doesn’t necessarily want to be staff on someone else’s show and build up their career over five years on the chance that they someday make their own show,” says Jennifer Goyne Blake, Sundance’s senior manager of the episodic program.

In a final indicator of TV’s inroads, Sundance soon thereafter opened its doors to selling series. In 2014, indie darling Mark Duplass approached Groth about premiering the animated series Animals and selling it at the 2015 festival alongside such movies as John Crowley’s Brooklyn and Sean Baker’s Tangerine. That diverged from Top of the Lake, The Jinx, Girlfriend Experience and O.J., all of which already had distribution in place via SundanceTV, HBO, Starz and ESPN, respectively. If successful, it would mean a Sundance marketplace was open for TV business. Duplass wrangled buyers in the Egyptian Theatre on Main Street, and a frenzy followed.

“I was there in the room,” Groth recalls. “I wanted to see how it played and what the buyer’s response was, and it was huge. They sold it to HBO right after that. Ever since then we’ve had the notion of, ‘There might be an emerging marketplace for independent episodic work, and we can help play a part in creating a marketplace like we did for film in the late ’80s–early ’90s.’”

Given the incursion, is Sundance — next open for business January 18– 28, 2018 — due for a rebrand? Sundance Screen Festival, anyone?

“I wish I had a crystal ball so I could answer what the festival will look like five years from now,” Groth says. “I love movies and I love watching movies in a theater. So as long as I am working at Sundance, there will always be a huge film presence at the festival. But we’re going to respond to the artist. If there’s interesting work being done in whatever form, Sundance will support it.” —Tatiana Siegel

PARISA TAGHIZADEH/SEE-SAW FILMS; MARC SMERLING

Top of the Lake

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Lead Actress in a Drama Series

KERRY WASHINGTON

"Kerry Washington . . . has changed the cultural landscape."

Allure

THURSDAYS 9|8c #Scandal

in the

mix In his newest comedy, a Brit known for creating loyal fans tests the limits of friendship.

ITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

Ill Behaviour, a six-part comedy thriller series that Showtime acquired from the BBC, unfolds with the newly divorced Joel (Chris Geere) perched on the ledge of a Bristol, England, apartment building in his skivvies, tossing pound notes (we assume) in the air. Down below, passersby are snatching them up.

Turns out, Joel’s split has landed him in the dumps — despite the multimillion-pound settlement from his wealthy former wife. Luckily, his best friends, Charlie (Tom Riley) and Tess (Jessica Regan), arrive in time to save his life and the rest of the cash, which will soon come in handy.

For, Charlie reveals that he’s been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma

and then I have to sit back and watch them crash and burn.”

A British comedy writer, and the son of a TV director and an actress, Bain began crafting TV scripts with a writing partner, Jesse Armstrong, while inhaling American comedies like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Their best-known comedy, Peep Show, evolved into a cult favorite on Britain’s Channel 4 and centers on two friends — one a slacker, the other socially awkward — who share a London flat. Next they created the comedy-drama Fresh Meat, which revolves around six college misfits who live together off-campus.

CRAIG SUGDEN

Sam Bain

and is determined to cure himself with natural remedies. Alarmed by his game plan, Joel and Tess concoct a plot to force him to undergo chemotherapy. Because that’s what these friends do. They rescue each other, whether the one being rescued likes it or not.

“It’s really like a wishful fantasy,” says creator-writer–executive producer Sam Bain, who got the idea from his own life, watching friends make bad decisions and being unable to stop them. “I can’t grab the steering wheel of their life and twist it hard to the right,” he bemoans. “I just say what I can, 14 EMMY

To write Ill Behaviour, which launched November 13 (viewers can catch up on Showtime Anytime or on demand), Bain went solo and darker. He also turned it into a caper. Police, lies and manhunts come into play. So does a self-centered, alcoholic doctor named Nadia, played by Riley’s real-life American wife, Lizzy Caplan (Virginia Masters in Masters of Sex).

Essentially, though, it remains a show about friendship. “People are crossing boundaries to save the life of a friend,” Bain says. “I guess it’s really the ultimate version of tough love.” —Ann Farmer

F O R YO U R C O N S I D E R AT I O N L E A D A C TO R I N A D R A M A S E R I E S

JASON RITTER

“A

superb, complex performance.”

TVLine

TUESDAYS 10|9c #KevinProbably

in the

mix IFC shakes up Saturday nights with shorts from Funny Or Die.

YAK HACK Conversations with Pigeon Man

FODtv

Long-Haired Businessmen

Learn to Paint with the Shirtless Painter ASMR with Kelly Whispers

Yelling Man

All kinds of crazy characters — from the Shirtless Painter to Pigeon Man — are popping up in short-form programming from a network dubbed FODtv during IFC’s Saturday movie nights.

It might look like IFC is being hacked, but the cable network is in on the joke.

IFC commissioned the interstitial content, which began airing in October, from Funny Or Die, the comedy website and production hub founded by Will Ferrell, Adam McKay and Chris Henchy.

“They reached out earlier this year and asked if our team had any ideas about fun stuff they could do on IFC on Saturday nights,” says FOD editor-inchief Dan Abramson. “That was a fun jumping-off point to brainstorm, which is how we ended up on the FODtv premise.”

“It was not hard getting to Funny Or Die TV,” says IFC president and general manager Jen Caserta, noting that the FOD approach to humor is a natural fit with IFC’s “Always On, Slightly Off” brand positioning.

“We’re telling the world we’re in business together,” Caserta adds, and that’s true in more ways than one. AMC Networks, parent company of IFC, bought a minority ownership stake in Funny Or Die not long after the FOD short Brockmire was developed into an IFC television series starring Hank Azaria and Amanda Peet.

Content for FODtv — which has the look of a network with “the budget 16 EMMY

The Divorced Dad Cooking Show

of a public-access station,” Abramson quips — is created by an in-house team at Funny Or Die as well as producers brought in for specific projects.

The result: micro-episodes — all under a minute — of shows like Learn to Paint with the Shirtless Painter, Conversations with Pigeon Man, Long-Haired Businessmen, ASMR with Kelly Whispers, Yelling Man and The Divorced Dad Cooking Show.

Viewers can glean all they need to know about the premise of Learn to Paint with the Shirtless Painter from the show’s title.

Conversations with Pigeon Man developed from a comic on the Funny Or Die site. “We wanted to find new homes for Pigeon Man, so a while ago we built a Pigeon Man costume,” Abramson relates.

The costume was used a couple of times but was mostly lying around the FOD L.A. office collecting dust until Conversations with Pigeon Man — which finds the bird-man in a Charlie Rose talk show–style setting — was created.

“He is the opposite of Charlie Rose in every way,” Abramson says of the character, who, notably, doesn’t wear pants.

So, is creating comedy for television any different than making it for the web? “It’s pretty similar, for me at least,” Abramson says. “One of the beauties of the internet is, you have a lot of creative license and a lot of freedom.

It was great of IFC to welcome that. They’ve been receptive to a lot of really absurd ideas every step of the way.” —Christine Champagne

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FR EDDI E H I G H MO RE

LEAD ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES

“HIGHMORE APPROACHES HIS ROLE WITH SENSITIVITY AND NUANCE, AND THE SHOW’S DEPICTION OF AUTISM IS THOUGHTFUL AND VISUALLY COGENT” VARIETY

MONDAYS 10|9c #TheGoodDoctor

in the

Presidential Perils

They instead shot some scenes in the Dominican Republic, including the moment when Roosevelt’s party encountered a fifty-foot waterfall impeding their passage. The bulk of the film, though, was shot on an Amazonian river that closely resembled the River of Doubt: it featured the same serpentine trajectory and almost identical rainforest vistas, and, as it turned out, some of the same frights that the original expedition encountered.

“When we went to bed at night, we could hear caiman flopping about,” says Maggio, referring to the large reptiles that troll the waters. One crewmember, taking his picture with a tree-climbing sloth, was assaulted. “It took four men to pull its claws out.”

Thankfully, just as Roosevelt’s indigenous comrades proved highly resourceful, the locals assisting Maggio’s crew concocted a homemade John Maggio gets his feet wet remedy, a black paste, which they rubbed over the with a camera operator. cut to hasten the healing. The same men served as guides and animal wranglers. They even handBefore John Maggio tackles a new biopic, he digs for that obscure but insight- carved replicas of the original dugouts used in the ful anecdote or fatal flaw in his subject. He found both when he took on President 1913–14 expedition.

Theodore Roosevelt and his decision at age fifty-five to voyage by dugout canoe Actors were chosen from a whitewater rafting down an uncharted Brazilian Amazon tributary then known as the River of Doubt. team (a portly one played Roosevelt). Their cos“In this instance, he stretched too far,” says Maggio, who wrote, directed tumes were never washed. As they went along, the costume designer “tore and produced Into the Amazon, a two-hour documentary that premieres up the shirts and dirtied the pants,” Maggio says, to match the few existing January 9 on PBS’s American Experience and tells this lesser-known story photos of the original expedition (their camera equipment having been abanabout the once seemingly indomitable outdoorsman-statesman. doned to lighten the load).

“The Amazon,” Maggio says, “really kicked his butt.”

Maggio’s team, on the other hand, used drones to capture panorama The journey — which involved a thirty-eight-day overland trek to the shots. When shooting from canoes, they placed cameras on gimbals for stariver and then a 400-mile paddle down its treacherous waters — almost cost bility. “It was terrifying,” says Maggio, recalling how they passed expensive Roosevelt his life. At one point, injured and sick, he begged to be left behind. lenses back and forth while floating only inches above the water and also had Three men did perish. The others, including Roosevelt’s son, Kermit, and legto protect their gear from daily torrential rains. endary Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon, likewise suffered from the intense The documentary addresses why Roosevelt (who had recently lost his heat, blood-sucking insects, malaria and dysentery. bid for a third presidential term) seized on such a quest. His health never fully Maggio originally intended to precisely follow Roosevelt’s footsteps. recovered.

However, a scouting trip convinced him that filming on the same rapids-rid“His decision was based on hubris that he could survive anything,” Magdled tributary — in an area of the Amazon basin still largely undeveloped — gio muses. “But it speaks to the Amazon of today. It’s still a frontier. It can’t could prove too risky for his crew and their equipment. be tamed.” —Ann Farmer 18 EMMY

COURTESY OF WGBH/AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

A filmmaker retraces Teddy Roosevelt’s risky Amazon adventure.

in the

Last year, Letitia Wright turned down a role in Sofia Coppola’s film The Beguiled, a seemingly head-scratching move given that the Guyanese-born actress had been toiling almost exclusively in British TV at the time.

But she recalls being in a bad place in her life, with her self-worth dictated by the whims of any random casting agent. Instead, she embarked on a sabbatical to immerse herself in her faith.

“I heard this voice that’s like, ‘What you’re turning down now, you’re going to get back far more than what you’re sacrificing,’” says Wright, who has lived in London since she was seven.

“And I went on a path of Christianity. I sacrificed a really good job for my spiritual well-being.”

The time off reaped rewards. Wright landed a starring role in season four of Netflix’s Emmywinning Black Mirror, debuting late December, as well as a pivotal role in the Marvel tentpole Black Panther, due in February. In the coming months, she also will appear in the films The Commuter, opposite Liam Neeson, and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One and, on TV, in the third season of AMC’s Humans.

The Black Mirror gig was especially satisfy-

ing: she’d been forced to turn down a small role in season three because it clashed with her Humans schedule. But as she was wrapping production on the Marvel film earlier this year, she tried again and taped an audition one exhausted night. A week later, her agents called to say the role was hers — and it was bigger than what she’d given up the year before. “Just being a tree in Black Mirror, you should be grateful,” she jokes.

As for specifics, she remains coy. “It’s top-secret stuff,” she says. “I play a lone ranger–type traveler. She stumbles across this museum, and in the museum are a lot of cool gadgets. It’s intertwined into three stories and kind of trippy.”

Naturally.

When she’s not acting in a museum, Wright frequently visits them in her downtime. Or any quiet space, like her favorite church, though she admits it can be difficult to be a devout Christian in the world of film and TV. Still, she’s up for the challenge.

“When I first stepped into my faith, I was very doubtful about acting,” she says. “I thought, ‘What kind of impact can I make there?’ God told me that if you hide in the four walls of church and you’re taking all of this light and love and happiness and you don’t go out and share that, then what difference is that going to make?” —Tatiana Siegel

BIO PICK

Twist of Faith

KWAKU ALSTON

mix

in the

mix Twenty-five years ago, Chris Carter wanted to believe. He’d just written a pilot, certain that it would be unlike anything else on the air. The trouble was, the networks reacted to the idea of an alien-chasing FBI agent and his skeptical scientist-partner as if it hailed from another planet.

SMALLZ AND RASKIND/FOX

It took two pitches by Carter and Peter Roth, then head of 20th Television, to bring Fox around, Carter recalls: “They couldn’t quite understand what I was trying to do. The only thing like it back then was Sightings [a syndicated paranormal news series]. Even after they decided to put it on the air, they made me put text at the beginning, saying the show was based on actual stories. The mindset then was that people wouldn’t believe any show that dealt with the supernatural.”

After twenty-five years, tens of millions of viewers, countless conventions and sixteen Emmys, it’s safe to say that most everyone is a believer in the paranormal pursuits of agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Though the series ended its nine-season run in 2002, it returned for six more episodes in early 2016 and will resume in January with another ten. Craig Tomashoff spoke with Carter, creator–executive producer of the series, about the Scully effect, the Trump effect and one surprising fan.

Has Mulder and Scully’s quest for the truth changed over the years in ways that you didn’t expect?

The show always had its heart rooted in a political reality, so we seized on things I felt were salient during the ‘90s. That was a sort of Watergate holdover, a distrust of government and institutions.

That’s why I always felt Scully was the heart of the show. Her belief in science is what kept everything grounded. It’s what kept Mulder tethered, despite his belief in conspiracies and shadow governments.

That wave of distrust faded after 2001, only to come full circle with the era we’re in now. When we came back to do that first event series, things had completely flipped. Now there’s a distrust of science and a wholesale belief in conspiracies that has put The X-Files once again in unfamiliar territory.

Does that mean the new season will have a Trumpian aspect?

We’ve definitely incorporated the new political reality. It’s not just about the current administration, which I’m sure is on the minds of everyone doing TV right now. It’s also about how the internet has been a complete game changer, what’s happening technologically and in the digital realm — we’re exploring all those things.

When the show returned last year, Joel McHale played an Alex Jones–like conspiracy theorist. Did you get any feedback from the real Alex Jones?

He contacted me after those shows aired

Reach of Tru t The X-Files, the series that united believer and skeptic — and inspired intense loyalty— returns with its creator still at the helm.

Through the years, this legendary actor has entertained us.

First, he starred in 162 episodes of the television classic, Magnum P.I. And now he’s surpassed that number of episodes on Blue Bloods, a top-10 show and a hit around the world.

And we couldn’t be more proud.

We’re honored that has called CBS home for over five decades with more to come.

©2017 CBS Corporation

in the

mix and wanted to meet. We never did, but I couldn’t help but think about how the sort of conspiracies he talks about have gone mainstream. The fact that he has the president’s ear is extraordinary to me. He sent a very warm greeting and was certainly — if not flattered by the inclusion of that character, at least pleased to make note of it.

At some point, The X-Files stopped being just a show and turned into a cultural reference point, even for those who’d never seen an episode.

What effect has The X-Files had on the real world?

When we had our twentieth anniversary at Comic-Con, people in the audience started talking about how they were now doctors and scientists as a result of watching Dana Scully. They call it the “Scully effect” in scientific circles. There’s something to be said for a show that turns women toward a career in science.

I always hoped the show had a certain effect, especially given some of the mantras that stuck around, like “The truth is out there” and “I want to believe.”

The X-Files is famous for its dark storytelling. Is there another element of the show that hasn’t received enough recognition?

I think the stylistic elements, which have been a hallmark, have been underappreciated. This became a director’s show right away. We had two directors, Kim Manners and Rob Bowman, who directed eighty-five of the 202 episodes and are a major reason why you can still pull The X-Files off the shelf and it seems current. We were lucky enough to also attract guest directors like David Nutter, Bob Goodwin, Dan Sackheim and others. Their styles were perfect for the tales we were telling. They knew how to make these forty-five-minute movies.

Was it important to bring in a fresh group of writers and directors for the latest incarnation?

We wanted to get the band back together, but we also made sure to invite new people. Everyone is bringing their own take on the world as well as on The X-Files. There are always new facets for them to explore. This time, we had three directors who had never directed before. There’s Carol Banker, who had been a script supervisor on the show, along with Holly Dale and Kevin Hooks. We also had writers who had never written on the show before — Karen Nielson, Kristen Cloke and Shannon Hamblin.

When you close your eyes and think of The X-Files, what is the most indelible image that flashes in front of you?

It’s the moment I met David and Gillian in those early casting sessions. Gillian gave me a gift when we wrapped the series back in 2002. She’d found the pages from those sessions for Mulder and Scully. On those pages, I’d written “Yes!” by David’s name. On Gillian’s, I wrote, “Test!” I will never forget knowing immediately these were people I wanted to bring to network.

How have you changed as a writer-producer since the show first went on the air?

I think I’m the same person generally, but with a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge under his belt. I used to say I wrote one-handed, with one hand on the phone and the other on the keyboard. These days, I have rules like, “Never write after dinner.” That’s a big change from how I used to write around the clock.

When a show first comes on, you live in complete fear. Everyone around you is braced for failure and hedging their bets. What you learn from experience is that things are going to work out. But you need to keep figuring out how you can reignite people’s interest and passion for what you’re doing.

24 EMMY

On board for Star Trek: Discovery, a translator gives voice to aliens.

Using Their Words

I

NTERGALACTIC COMMUNICATION COULD HAVE BEEN A PROBLEM FOR THE CAST OF STAR TREK. Fortunately, writers of the original series — which debuted in 1966 — conceived a “universal translator,” a device that translates alien languages in real time into the native tongue of listeners.

It wasn’t until the 1979 feature film Star Trek: The Motion Picture that Klingons were actually heard speaking Klingon.

“In that movie, the Klingons are on their bridge, under attack, and they yell things,” says Robyn Stewart, the official Klingon translator for Star Trek: Discovery, now streaming on CBS All Access. “James Doohan, who played Scotty, made up the words for them. But at the time, they didn’t mean anything.”

Everything changed with 1984’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

“The producers decided they wanted the Klingons to play a bigger part in that movie,” Stewart explains. “They decided they would add reality by having them actually speaking the language. So they asked linguist Marc Okrand to create the language.”

Stewart would come to know Okrand from the Klingon Language Institute, a group that promotes the study and development of the language. Okrand used the dialogue and subtitles from the first film as the basis for a working language, Stewart explains. “He made it backwards compatible, if you will. And he’s continued to develop the language ever since.”

In 1985 Okrand published The Klingon Dictionary, and Stewart — who’s conversant in several languages — discovered it two years later. “I got it because it was fun,” she recalls. “As I read it I thought, ‘Wow, I could learn Klingon from this.’ And I set out to do that.”

Another book by Okrand, Klingon for the Galactic Traveler, was released in 1997, about a year after Stewart joined the institute. “I went to the third annual meeting — it was so exciting,” she says. “I could speak Klingon and people understood me.”

Stewart’s job with Star Trek: Discovery includes translating entire scenes from English into Klingon, conferring with vocal coaches to ensure actors use proper diction and editors don’t make cuts in the middle of lines. “The editors don’t speak the language, but they still do a beautiful job.”

While most of her work is straightforward translation — as with any foreign language — every now and then Stewart is stumped, like when a script mentioned a coiling snake.

“Klingon doesn’t really have a word for the motion a snake makes,” she explains, “which is the metaphor the writers were thinking about. I had to stop and think about that one. From time to time, I’ll email Marc and say, ‘I was going to express these thoughts this way — what do you think?’ or ‘I really don’t have a word for this.’ He’s always ready to help.”

One new word has been created for the series — tutlh — which refers to tattoos. “It’s three letters in Klingon,” she says, noting the tlh is expressed by one letter in Klingon. “It’s one of the more difficult sounds, so the actors had to work up to saying it.”

Not only has the manufactured language grown within the Star Trek universe, it’s expanded beyond it. Fans can buy a Klingon computer keyboard and a Klingon collector’s edition of Monopoly, or read Hamlet in the emperor’s tongue. —Paula Hendrickson

in the

mix Spike becomes the Paramount Network, and new series arrive with an ardent rebrand.

A NAME WORTH ITS FAME

positioned to compete in the scripted field, starting with Waco.

The limited series, based on the 1993 FBI siege of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect in Texas, will debut January 24. Michael Shannon and Taylor Kitsch headline a cast that includes John Leguizamo, Rory Culkin and Melissa Benoist of Supergirl.

Waco fits perfectly into the Paramount plan for top-quality general entertainment, Cox maintains. “Everything should feel elevated,” he says.

“Across genres, it should feel cinematic, compelling and original.”

The creative team behind Waco — brothers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle — initially sold the show to Spike but were excited when they got the news about the rebrand.

“It’s an incredible brand,” says Drew, who wrote the script with John, his fellow executive producer. “And it’s been a great partnership. You never know whether your studio or network partners are going to be making the same show you’re making. From the very beginning, they wanted to make this version.”

Waco is one of six scripted series Kay hopes to air in the coming year. Eventually he’d like to offer eight scripted shows a year, along with nonscripted shows, docuseries and Paramount films.

And the Paramount film library could be the source for future original series. With Paramount Pictures chairman Jim Gianopulos, Kay is looking at properties old and new that might have a character suitable for a spinoff.

“It’s a great library — and we own it,” Kay says.

“That’s important because we need to control the rights as much as we can.”

But that’s down the road. For now, he’s happy to share the story behind the Paramount Pictures iconic Taylor Kitsch as David logo, which the new network has tweaked for its own Koresh in Waco purposes.

“The stars were meant to [represent] the original stars signed to the studio,” he says. “Basically, the studio created the movie star. I like that, because we’re all about stars. We want stars in front of and behind the camera.”

—Curt Wagner

That’s the thinking behind parent company Viacom’s move to relaunch its Spike TV as the Paramount Network. The new network will debut January 18 with a live, hour-long version of the Spike TV hit Lip Sync Battle.

“Paramount represents over 100 years of storytelling,” says Paramount Network president Kevin Kay. “It means premium.”

Premium is a key word in the lexicon of the new enterprise, which began to take shape when Bob Bakish became president and CEO of Viacom in late 2016.

Kay, who had been with Spike TV since 2003 (when it was called TNN) and had worked through several rebrands of the so-called “first men’s network,”

was working on yet another company transition. Spike executives were programming Lip Sync Battle and other shows that skewed more evenly among men and women, with the goal of turning the outlet into a general entertainment network. But the progress wasn’t as robust as they’d hoped.

“We knew what was standing in the way,” Kay says. “That was the name: Spike. So, when Bob said he’d really like to use the name Paramount for one of these networks, the logical one was Spike.”

BESIDES WACO, THE PARAAnd the rest, as they say, is history — in the MOUNT NETWORK HAS making. Paramount will enter the Peak TV landANNOUNCED THESE THREE scape with a handful of high-profile new scripted SCRIPTED SERIES FOR 2018: series, as well as the return of Spike’s mostAmerican Woman watched nonscripted shows. Along with Lip Sync The childhood of Kyle RichBattle, Paramount will air new seasons of Ink Masards (The Real Housewives ter, Bar Rescue and Bellator MMA. of Beverly Hills) inspired this half-hour series from John Wells.

Keith Cox, president of development and Alicia Silverstone stars as Bonnie, production at Paramount Network as well as TV an unconventional single mom Land and CMT, believes the new network is well

ORIGIN STORIES

26 EMMY

struggling to raise her two daughters in the 1970s. Mena Suvari and Jennifer Bartels also star.

Heathers Based on the 1988 cult classic film, this hour-long black comedy anthology is set in the present day as high schooler Veronica (Grace Victoria Cox) deals with a different but equally vicious clique. Original Heathers cast member Shannen

Doherty will guest star.

Yellowstone Oscar nominee Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water, Sicario) writes and directs this family drama led

by Kevin Costner. As John Dutton, the patriarch of the country’s largest contiguous ranch, he battles adversaries of all kinds on the new frontier.

—C.W.

MILLER MOBLEY/PARAMOUNT NETWORK

When you’re planning to turn a TV network into a marquee destination, it doesn’t hurt to take the name of the movie studio that brought audiences the Godfather trilogy, among other great films.

As Elizabeth II in Netflix’s The Crown, Claire Foy brings warmth and vulnerability to a role that could easily seem cold. Says a costar: “That’s a remarkable feat to watch.”

BY TATIANA SIEGEL

T’S 3 P.M. — SO-CALLED “HAPPY HOUR” AT THE GREENWICH HOTEL IN TRIBECA — AND THAT MEANS FRESH-BAKED MACA ADAMIA COOKIES ARE BEING SERVED IN THE COURTYARD. Claire Foy takes two. The London-based actress isn’t one to d demur, delivering exuberant praise with each bite. “Oh, my God,” she ccries with a full mouth. It’s a far cry from the quiet containment she embodies as Queen Elizabeth II on Netflix’s The Crown.

Just two weeks ago, Foy wrapped her second and final season starring as Her Royal Highness and is here in New York doing some press before the series returns on December 8. Two days into the trip, she’s already feeling a lot less constrained. Instead of being encumbered by stately gowns and all the queen’s heavy bling, she’s sporting a simple white sweater, high-waisted

trousers, a tiny gold necklace and a no-nonsense bob haircut.

And on this warm October day, Foy is ready to indulge. After this, she muses, she’ll hit a favorite boutique and “probably spend thousands of dollars on jumpers I’m not going to wear and just walk around and go have a glass of wine.” Or maybe not. “It’s so expensive in New York, Jesus Christ.”

The previous night, Foy had an unsettling encounter with a reporter, who was perplexed by the actress’ lack of a social-media presence or high-profile personal foibles that make for good copy. “A woman told me, ‘You are boring.’

I was like, ‘Thanks. I’m ordinary and boring and conventional?’” she recounts.

“That’s probably what I felt growing up, and actually no one is any of those things. I think anyone who feels that they have the authority to comment on someone else as a person, it says more about them than it does about me.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RYAN PFLUGER/AUGUST TelevisionAcademy.com

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For those who have spent the most time with Foy over the past two years — like costars Matt Smith and Vanessa Kirby, who play the queen’s husband (Philip, Duke of Edinburgh) and sister (Princess Margaret), respectively — the reporter’s assessment is, well, madness.

“She’s an antithesis of boring,” says Smith, who first met Foy during a screen test in 2015. “She’s wonderfully intelligent and she’s got a great sense of humor. What a silly thing for that journalist to say.”

Kirby goes even further. “She can drink Matt Smith under the table. I’ve seen it,” she says with a knowing laugh.

“She’s kind of clumsy and brilliant and funny. She’s like the most layered, complicated, least boring person. How could you be as good an actress as she is and be boring?

She has to access so many different people, and she does it not by intellectualizing it or by thinking herself into a performance.”

For her part, boredom is something Foy steadfastly avoids, at least professionally. She won’t play the same type of character twice, so don’t look for her to follow up her Crown stint in another royal drama.

“I don’t like to repeat,” she says. “I think repetition is weird.”

Also peculiar is Hollywood phoniness. “When I first went out to L.A., I met people who were like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m such a huge fan.’ I was like, ‘What? Are you?’ I know that’s probably a good backup thing to say when you meet someone, but say what you mean and mean what you say.

I’m a big girl. Just be honest.”

As Foy sips a cappuccino that is no longer hot, she offers her own candid glimpse into her psyche and relates a strange dream from the previous night. “I was looking at a bridge with gates that were on fire, and I walked across the bridge and it started to crumble and the water had melting lava in it, but it wasn’t hurting me,” she says and pauses.

“Yeah, it was weird.”

N THE WAKE OF HER EMMY-NOMINATED A AND GOLDEN GLOBE–WINNING TURN AS THE RESOLUTE MONARCH, FOY HAS CROSSED THE THR RESHOLD INTO IN-DEMAND LEADING-LADY TERRITORY AND IS NOW WORKING WITH THE LIKES OF A-LIS ST FILM DIRECTORS STEVEN SODERBERGH AND DAMIEN CHAZELLE. C How she landed the starring role in The Crown is an unlikely saga in and of itself. After first reading Peter Morgan’s script in late 2014, she felt compelled to audition, even though she was five months pregnant. Given her condition, she didn’t think she had much chance and turned up for a first read incredibly relaxed.

Cindy Holland, Netflix’s vice-president of original series, recalls seeing that first tape of Foy auditioning for creator– writer–executive producer Morgan, executive producer– director Stephen Daldry and casting director Nina Gold.

“I remember being struck by this extreme vulnerability in her eyes,” Holland says, “while her face and her composure were absolute steel. They were looking at quite a lot of folks for the role. But we all saw that Claire was a standout and could play with a real emotional depth, just in her eyes and just with a slight change of expression. It’s a pretty brave thing to do, to take on arguably the most famous woman in the world.”

Foy was called back for a second test that included a fitting, complete with costume and full makeup. Despite her bump, she nailed it. The next step should have been to fly to Los Angeles for one final test, but by then, she was six months pregnant, and air travel was out of the question. A week before she married actor Stephen Campbell Moore, she got the phone call that the role was hers.

“I was like, ‘Do they know that I’m pregnant? Obviously, they do. How do they feel about this? What on earth is going on here?’ I was in disbelief, really,” Foy remembers. “Then I agreed to it and I said, ‘Listen, I don’t know what state I’m going to be in. I don’t know how this is going to go.‘ You sort of expect the worst when you are about to have a child. The fact that four months after giving birth [when filming was due to begin], I’m going to be walking — I was like, ‘I can’t see that happening. I see myself lying prone on a bed in pain.’”

But walk she did, all the way to season one’s lavish coronation ceremony, from which she would duck out to nurse her daughter, now two and a half.

“In what profession am I allowed to have a child, breastfeed my child on set and have them say, ‘It’s great. Good for you. You are working and you have a baby’?” she marvels. “I was very, very fortunate they supported me in doing that.”

And while many actresses might struggle to transition between the contrasting worlds of harried mum and regal sovereign, Holland remembers Foy’s seemingly effortless ability to do just that.

“We were visiting and she had just recently given birth and was going from being the queen and having a quite stirring conversation to running downstairs to deal with her child,” she says. “To see that quick transformation underscored the talent that she had.”

That Foy is “literally nothing like Elizabeth,” says Kirby, makes the metamorphosis even more impressive. For starters, the actress grew up well removed from the aloof British aristocracy in an affectionate middle-class family in Manchester, the youngest of three children. (“I don’t come from a wealthy background,” she says. “My mum’s family were working-class Irish.”) The family moved to Buckinghamshire when she was six, and her parents divorced a couple of years later.

“When my mom and dad split up, we spent a lot of time going to my nana’s house in Edgware. I realized at a young age that having laughter and singing and dancing didn’t cost anything,” she says. “The happiest times were when all my family was together. We have a huge family. Once we had Christmas at our house and there were like twenty-five people, and that’s immediate family.”

The call to acting came much later. Foy initially wanted to be a cinematographer and as a student at Liverpool John Moores University did her dissertation on Alfred Hitchcock.

At twenty-two, she enrolled in the Oxford School of Drama and began performing in plays such as Top Girls, Watership Down and Easy Virtue.

“It wasn’t that I wanted to be an actress,” she says.

“Standing on a stage and having people look at me — that wasn’t the goal. It was more being able to express myself, or maybe being able to be braver than someone else, and also that feeling of approaching a character and [thinking], ‘I’m never going to get in there. I’m never going to understand this person.’ And then gradually getting to know them and finding the connection.”

ROBERT VIGLASKY/NETFLIX

From there, she landed a string of British TV roles and eventually the plum part of Queen Anne Boleyn in the six-part drama series Wolf Hall, for which she earned a BAFTA nomination. There were plenty of bad auditions along the way, including one for a little-seen horror movie, Season of the Witch, starring Nicolas Cage.

“I had to pretend to be possessed by a devil — in an American accent — with a director and the casting director in a room that was as big as this table. I just went for it,” she says, reenacting her screams. “I’m cringing, thinking about it. It’s so embarrassing. And you relive it in your head. It’s like being drunk, and then the next day you want to send a text saying, ‘I’m so sorry if I said something that offended you last night.’ You have to wait for them to reject you.”

But to her surprise, they didn’t. And it was on that Eastern European set that she first met Moore.

“I did. So there you go. Good times, good times,” she says with a chuckle.

bloody pleased. “If Claire was playing me, I’d be so grateful that somebody brought intelligence and empathy and genius to the portrayal,” she says. “The thing about Claire is, she’s not cold. It’s amazing that she managed to make somebody who could, on the surface, seem cold incredibly warm and soulful and deep and vulnerable and fragile and strong and brave. That’s a remarkable feat to watch.”

F FTER HER NEW YORK TRIP, FOY WAS HEADED TO ATLANTA T TO PLAY JANET ARMSTRONG IN CHAZELLE’S NEIL AR RMSTRONG BIOPIC, FIRST MAN, OPPOSITE RYAN GOSLING. For the role, she needs to chop off her hair, so she’s thinking of buyin ng a hat when she hits the downtown shops later today. And after a short Christmas break, she’s on to Berlin to star as hacker savant Lisbeth Salander in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Sony’s reboot of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. Somewhere in the middle of all this Crown heavylifting, she managed to shoot a movie entirely in secret with Soderbergh. She enjoyed working with the maverick director, whose sensibility dovetailed with her own.

“I was like, ‘Yes, please. Yes, please,’” she says of the mysterious film, maybe titled Unsane (she’s not saying). “He doesn’t care about reputation.

What is the point of just being safe? Go and do something else if you want to be safe.”

And as season two of The Crown debuts, Foy is about to wave a glovedhand goodbye to the series. The plan always was for her to play the young queen for two seasons, and now Olivia Colman will seize the scepter for the show’s third and fourth seasons, playing Elizabeth a decade later. Although

OWADAYS, SHE AND MOORE ARE TRYING TO BALANCE ACTING WITH PARENTING. Unlike Elizabeth and Philip — who consigned their children to nannies while traveling for six months at a time — the couple keeps their daughter close at hand, alternating the child-minding while the other is on set.

“I can’t imagine anything worse than being away from my child for six months. I couldn’t,” Foy says. Still, she feels the guilt that saddles many working mothers. As she attends to a red-hot career and parental responsibilities, she finds that she’s apologizing a lot.

“You get to the point where you go, ‘I’m really sorry that you feel like that and I really appreciate what you feel and I’m really sorry that Mommy had to go to work,’” she says. “But there’s an equality and an understanding that both Mommy and Daddy go to work, and we take turns and we share.”

At work, the Crown set was intense. The toughest times for Foy were the wedding and coronation sequences, which took days to shoot and wound up being “an endurance test.”

Smith recalls a similarly trying stretch on location in South Africa, where Foy managed to keep the vibe light and carefree.

“It was so hot,” he says. “It was like 110 in the shade.

And we were on the tarmac. And we’re dressed as the queen and Prince Philip — I was in all this military regalia, and she’s in this huge dress with countless layers. We were cooking in the heat, moaning and laughing in equal measure at exactly the same time. We really had a wonClaire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II with Matt Smith as her husband, Prince Philip derful time.”

Jolly good fun or not, the real challenge for Foy was keeping her emotions in check when she wanted to let them fly. she never was asked for input on who should wear the titular crown next, Foy “Peter writes in such a way that the feeling is there, but it’s my job to keep insists that Netflix and producers Left Bank Pictures have chosen amazingly a lid on it or underplay it,” she says. “Sometimes I want to be allowed to go, well.

‘I’m really angry.’ But that was never going to be in her bag of tricks.”

In fact, the two actresses have spoken a few times since Colman was At least not from what the producers gleaned about Queen Elizabeth. cast, and Foy tried to keep her otherwise candid opinions to herself. “It’s not Neither Morgan nor Foy had any contact with royal family members. Instead, mine anymore,” she explains. “It’s someone else’s.” But she did have one several close aides served as consultants. But as Foy notes, no one they colimportant tip for the veteran British actress and Emmy nominee (The Night laborated with had ever breached the inner sanctum of the House of Windsor.

Manager).

As for what the queen might think of Foy’s portrayal, Foy suspects that “The only advice I have is to make sure you take care of yourself and don’t Elizabeth probably would loathe watching the saddest and most painful moget too tired,” she says. “When you are doing a long-run show like that and it’s ments of her life, particularly the death of her father, King George VI. But as nine months per season, it’s hard work, long hours, long weeks, long months. a detail-oriented woman, the Head of the Commonwealth would likely enjoy It’s important to take time to get sleep.” the meticulously rendered sets, Foy adds.

So what if that seems a little boring? After hanging out with Foy, most Regardless, Kirby says the mistress of Buckingham Palace should be people should know better.

TelevisionAcademy.com

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What if I saw off the front of this speedboat and then we stick it onto the Suzuki Jimny jeep? What could possibly go wrong?

JEREMY CLARKSON

What? And then you’re going to somehow strap the jet engine from an aircraft in the trunk? We’re going to have to get this door off for a start….

You’re not going to break the speed record for an amphibious vehicle — you’re going to break both of your necks! Count me out!

JAMES MAY

WHENWRONG MAKESRIGHT The prospect of imminent calamity keeps viewers tuning in to Amazon’s The Grand Tour, where great cars meet great scenery, and three petrolheads bicker over whose engine is bigger, who makes a better cup of tea — and what you’ll get if you cross a Soviet warplane, a Suzuki Jimny and a speedboat. BY BENJI WILSON PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELLIS O’BRIEN/ AMAZON PRIME VIDEO

RICHARD HAMMOND

HIS,” JEREMY CLARKSON SAYS AS HE RUNS HIS HAND OVER A CAR THAT’S BEEN TURNED INTO A BOAT, WITH THE ENGINE FROM A JET AIRPLANE STRAPPED TO ITS BACK, “COULD BE A CLASSIC.” “This” is a sequence for season two of Amazon’s The Grand Tour. On a pontoon by the side of a lake near Huddersfield, England, Clarkson and his cohosts and compadres, James May and Richard Hammond, are putting the finishing touches on their bizarre boat-car. What got them to this point, as so often happens with The Grand Tour, was an argument among the three men.

They wanted to break the world amphibious-vehicle water-speed record.

Clarkson reckoned the best way to do that was to attach a jet engine from a Soviet warplane to a Suzuki Jimny and weld a speedboat hull to the front. Hammond and May were not so sure but, not surprisingly, Clarkson got his way. And so today he is helming the first test drive of a homemade deathtrap.

Hammond quickly rules himself out: it’s a two-seater and, anyway, “jet engines just aren’t my thing,” he says. He’s referring to a 288-mph dragster crash he had while filming The Grand Tour’s predecessor, Top Gear, in 2006, which left him seriously injured. So Hammond is staying out of the water. May and Clarkson change into fireproof race suits and put on neck braces, balaclavas and helmets. Gallows humor is the order of the day.

“Eighty-five percent of people who have attempted a water-speed record have been killed in the process,” Clarkson announces, like it’s a boast.

They bat around ideas to make The Grand Tour funnier, edgier.

“How about a season finale played to a soundtrack of ‘It’s Raining Men’ as we’re atomized and a red mist falls on the lake?” Clarkson suggests.

“We could end on Jeremy’s head rotating through the air in slow motion,” May says. They talk about their last wishes.

“James and I have a longstanding agreement that I can have his green Moto Guzzi motorbike if he dies first,” Hammond says. There is a thorough health-and-safety briefing, which Clarkson treats with predictable disdain.

Then Clarkson and May get into the “Jet Jimny,” laughing about how they don’t know what any of the buttons do, and the contraption is inched into the water with them strapped inside.

Among all the quips, it’s hard to tell if Clarkson and May are nervous, but they probably should be. The three Grand Tour hosts have taken some hits for their love of motoring over the years. One of the lowest points came in 2015, when the trio left Top Gear, the BBC show that made their names. Clarkson was fired after he punched a producer; May and Hammond left with him. A few months later, Amazon signed them to host The Grand Tour, essentially a bigger-budget version of the act they’d been honing for years.

Other hits have been literal. In addition to Hammond’s near-fatal 2006 crash, May broke his arm last year. This year, Clarkson got pneumonia, and Hammond crashed a motorbike in Mozambique and later was hospitalized when he rolled a supercar on a hill climb (more on that later).

The problem is that part of the trio’s appeal is the enduring prospect of imminent calamity. Things almost always go wrong, but they usually go wrong in the right way. And things going wrong in the right way for Clarkson, Hammond and May is funny.

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AKE THE JET JIMNY. CLARKSON FLICKS A SWITCH, AND THE JET ENGINE EXPLODES INTO LIFE. It makes

a gut-thumping din, sends spumes of spray in a fifty-yard arc… and

38 EMMY

propels the Jimny forward at about three miles per hour. Clarkson and May might as well be fooling around on a paddleboat, were it not for the colossal noise their contraption is creating. After five minutes of minimal progress, with Clarkson looking from speedometer to rear mirror in mock panic, the jet runs out of fuel. The camera boat pulls up alongside the stricken Jimny.

Clarkson takes one of his trademark pauses for effect and then announces, “It doesn’t work.”

“Nothing we do works,” he adds later. “It has to look like it might work, but not work.”

When things don’t work, the trio gets to bicker — and it’s the bickering, more than the camerawork or the superlative machines, Clarkson reckons, that has made global brands of first Top Gear and now The Grand Tour.

“See this pie chart?” he says, drawing a sketch. “Look, I did this for the crew and producers when we started this. I said to them, The Grand Tour is this much about the pictures,” he continues, drawing a minute slice of pie, “and THIS MUCH about the words.” Even though the photography on The Grand Tour is renowned, and the locations are reliably jaw-dropping, the cars are not the stars of this motoring show.

To see what Clarkson means by “the words,” we go back to a hangar at “Huddersfield International Airport” — really just a grass airstrip on a hilltop next to a couple of portable buildings. A sign that reads “GTIT” (subtitled “Grand Tour Institute of Technology”) is taped to the hangar entrance; inside, the hosts are about to film one of their three-handers. It is, unsurprisingly, a discussion about how to build a better amphibious boat, given the failures so far. But it’s actually a funny argument among three middle-aged men who will never agree to disagree.

There’s no script. There’s just a page with a series of bullet points — narrative nodes that, ideally, the conversation should follow — but none of the three even seems to look at it. It’s not clear if anyone says, “Action.” They just start talking, wandering around with power tools in hand, squabbling about who makes the best cup of tea.

For such a major part of Amazon’s slate, The Grand Tour is a surprisingly low-key, minimally staffed production. The same two camera operators who follow the hosts in their cars follow them around this room as the conversation ranges to such topics as albums by Scottish singer-songwriter King Creosote, May’s T-shirt (which has a picture of his own face on it), the density of air and whether Clarkson is wearing his welding visor the right way up. (He says it’s broken. “Why does nothing ever work?”) The cameras keep rolling throughout a very long take. It ends when Clarkson says, “Right, we’ve got enough.” There are no more takes.

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HE TRUTH IS THAT CLARKSON, HAMMOND AND MAY ARE VERY, VERY GOOD AT THIS, EVEN THOUGH “THIS” IS BASICALLY JUST THEM BEING THEMSELVES. They have an instinctive understanding, which allows

them to appear as though they will never understand each other. Through more than twenty seasons of Top Gear and a year on the road making The Grand Tour, they’ve got their petrolhead pantomime down to a fine art. The

nub of it is what happened in that Huddersfield hangar — it’s them rambling.

“Rambling is good,” Clarkson says later, when asked about their style.

“You do what’s necessary to get the program made, and then you just ramble.

Often the rambling provides better stuff than the stuff that’s planned. We’ve been working together for twelve years, so we can ramble.”

Three weeks later, they’re rambling again, this time in Switzerland, where the twists and turns of the Gotthard Pass on the Italian border provide the setting for a supercar challenge. Clarkson, in the same jeans he was wearing back in the U.K., is driving a bright yellow, fire-breathing, gas-engined Lamborghini; May has the keys to an electric hybrid Honda NSX; and Hammond has a futuristic all-electric Croatian car called a Rimac. Each believes his machine — one representing the past, one the present, one the future — is the best. The scenery is astonishing, but then it almost always is for The Grand Tour. Amazon’s $150 million investment is well known, and it allows the series to pick the world’s most stunning locations. But it’s not just about the backdrops.

“You can shoot as many pretty pictures as you like,” Clarkson says, “but eventually it’ll look like a screen saver. You need to have words in a story to make it work. The story is the important thing. And it’s quite a good one for this episode.”

So it’s not just the words they say — it’s the stories they cook up. And this story, for what is likely to be the first of the new season’s twelve episodes, is that each host is driving a supercar that reflects his own character.

“I can’t fit in the Rimac,” says Clarkson, who is six-foot-five, “and in any event I am the resident dinosaur, so it was obvious I should drive the dinosaur. James likes to maintain hilariously that he’s modern enough — because he doesn’t like old-fashioned stuff. So he wants to drive the NSX, and anyway he likes it and I don’t. Then that left Hammond in the Rimac.”

Like any good drama, The Grand Tour sets up the story and then maps out the consequences of each character’s decisions. Thus, Hammond has brought them all to Switzerland because it has the world’s fastest charging ports for his all-electric car. As a result, the three men have to spend a lot of time twiddling their thumbs near the charging point, waiting for his car to recharge. There are trips to the local chess museum, the transport museum and a pencil museum, with the other two needling Hammond endlessly for his car’s failings. Suffice it to say that when they do get their cars on the road for a drag race and a hill-climb trial, the results lead to little consensus. None of them likes the others’ cars. They make their case using the following dialectic: “You’re wrong.” “No, you’re wrong.”

Once the Rimac is all charged up, they head into central Lucerne. Inevitably, the super-wide supercars get stuck in the narrow streets of the Old Town, and hilarity ensues. It’s funny to watch but difficult to film. Fast, loud cars tend to attract attention, but loud cars with Clarkson, Hammond and May inside soon draw a sizable crowd. As the whole point of the scene is that the

cars can’t move, the hosts are stranded, easy targets for selfies and signatures. With the camera crew scurrying to get the shots but not get in the way, Clarkson attempts to perform a three-point turn in a car that is nearly as wide as it is long. By this point, Lucerne’s Old Town is in gridlock.

“It’s pandemonium,” producer Gavin Whitehead says. “Which is good.”

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OOD PANDEMONIUM IS AN APT DESCRIPTION OF WHAT THE GRAND TOUR TRIES TO CAPTURE. THE TAGLINE FOR SEASON ONE WAS, “WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?” And viewers duly tuned in to

find out. (Amazon doesn’t release viewing figures, but a speedy renewal suggests that The Grand Tour at least performed to expectations.)

Sometimes the pandemonium goes too far. A few days later, Hammond crashed again, missing a corner at high speed and rolling the Rimac down a hillside. It burst into flames with him inside. He was airlifted to a hospital and subsequently appeared on social media saying he was fine. You wouldn’t want to be on The Grand Tour’s insurance team.

The hosts, who created and write the show in conjunction with longtime producer Andy Wilman, have responded to some criticism of the first season with a few changes for the second, which begins December 8.

“Certain elements of the last [season] that we didn’t think worked quite as well as they should’ve done are going to be changed,” Clarkson says, “and then certain things that did work will be pumped up.”

Most notably, the huge globe-trotting “tent” that was a mobile studio base for the hosts and audience will now appear in a fixed location in the U.K. In season one, the hosts met their fans all around the world. Hammond says it was simply too much of an undertaking, like setting up and maintaining a medium-sized town every few weeks.

“I’m trying not to use the word logistics, but it was logistics, yeah,” Hammond says. “There were a few little operational things we learned about [season] one — parts of it were making our lives more difficult than they needed to be.”

He hastens to add that, in terms of how they make their program, season two of The Grand Tour will be more of the same.

“I think we’re sort of still doing it the way… well, the only way we know how, actually.”

Which means that in spite of, or possibly because of, all the mishaps, this GT is staying on the same road.

“People like us three clowning around, and people like fast cars,” Clarkson says. “And then you need stories with all the elements — great pictures, great scenery, great cars and us three bickering. That’s it.”

The Gotthard Pass, along the Swiss-Italian border, was the backdrop for a supercar challenge: Richard Hammond had the white Rimac, Jeremy Clarkson the yellow Lamborghini and James May the red Honda. In Lucerne’s Old Town, they created gridlock.

THE BIG SHORT

BY DANIEL DAN EL FRANKEL

WHY ARE SEASONS, EPISODES AND EVEN COMMERCIALS ALL TAKING A HAIRCUT THESE DAYS?

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ILLUSTRATION LLUSTRAT ON BY LOU BROOKS BROO

N 1977, PRODUCERS AARON SPELLING, LEONARD GOLDBERG AND MIKE NICHOLS SUCCEEDED IN THEIR QUEST TO CRAFT A WARTS-AND-ALL DEPICTION OF A REAL-LIFE SUBURBAN FAMILY FOR PRIMETIME TELEVISION. THEIR ABC SERIES FAMILY BECAME A HIT, PARTICULARLY WITH CRITICS. IT RAN FROM 1976 TO 1980, AND IN THE 1977-78 SEASON, THE PROGRAM YIELDED TWENTYTHREE TEAR-JERKING, FIFTY-MINUTE EPISODES. TelevisionAcademy.com

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UMP FORWARD FORTY YEARS, AND NBC IS HAVING SIMILAR SUCCESS WITH PRETTY MUCH THE SAME DRAMATIC FORMULA. THIS TIME AROUND, IT’S THE INTENSELY EARNEST MEMBERS OF THE PEARSON FAMILY IN THIS IS US WHO REGULARLY COME TO TERMS WITH UNEXPECTED TRAGEDY AND EVERYDAY MIRACLES. But fans of creator Dan Fogelman’s take on the modern American clan are getting a little less melodrama than their Family-loving parents did. Eighteen second-season episodes of This Is Us are on tap this year, each running forty-five minutes in length.

Of course, seasons are even more miniature in the cable and streaming universes these days, where series campaigns have been consolidated, on average, to ten episodes and can run in blocks of as few as six.

“On a broad level, we’re truly in a period of experimentation in television,” says Joe Lewis, who until recently was head of comedy, drama and virtual reality programming for Amazon Studios. “A lot of people are trying to figure out what the right length of a television series is.”

In some cases, the episodes are getting shorter, too.

With viewing of TV on mobile devices proliferating, moguls like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Peter Chernin are staking bets on short-form “snackable” video that’s optimized for the phonebased watching habits of younger viewers.

It’s not just the content that’s compressed; the advertising is getting truncated, too. For example, Fox Networks Group is following YouTube’s lead and has begun to sell six-second ad spots.

TV used to be the thing we accused of shortening our attention spans. Has our focus eroded so much that we can’t even indulge that bit of decadence with the old gusto?

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DON’T BUY THE ‘GENERATION GNAT’ THEORY,” JIM O’NEILL SAYS. AN ANALYST FOR OOYALA, A SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA–BASED ONLINE VIDEO TECHNOLOGY COMPANY, HE REJECTS THE NOTION THAT MILLENNIAL-AGE FOLKS HAVE DEVELOPED SHORT, GNAT-LIKE

ATTENTION SPANS, HAVING GROWN UP ON A STEADY STREAM OF YOUTUBE VIDEOS. O’Neill sits on one side of a rather polarized debate as to whether viewer attention spans have actually changed. But there’s no argument that TV delivery mechanisms have transformed dramatically. One big factor compressing program lengths is the migration to viewing shows on tablets and phones.

According to a recent study conducted by tech company Ericsson, half of all video content will be viewed on mobile devices by the year 2020.

“The increase in mobile-oriented viewing, particularly among young consumers, is certainly impacting the content industry,” says Brett Sappington, principal analyst for research company Parks Associates.

The general perception among mobile programmers is that short-form video of ten minutes or less is the best fit.

Katzenberg made headlines in October when he revealed a quest for an astronomical $2 billion in funding for WndrCo, a start-up production outfit that will specialize in short-form programming for mobile devices. He’s billing his so-called “New TV” unit as a kind of HBO for the mobile generation.

He follows former Fox executive Peter Chernin, who notably entered into a $500 million joint venture with AT&T in 2014. Their Otter Media is devoted to fulfilling the short, digital programming needs of an AT&T wireless division currently serving 137 million wireless subscribers across the U.S. While Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and Zach Galifianakis’s Between Two Ferns are notable examples of professionally produced short-form shows that have become hits on the mobile internet, there’s debate as to whether mobile consumers really want entire programming services built around short-form programming — beyond what they already get with YouTube.

Two years ago, for example, Verizon spent a fortune launching Go90, an ad-supported, short-form-video focused service targeted at its more than 147 million U.S. wireless customers.

But so far, Go90 has failed to find an audience.

“I surmise Go90 has been a bust because it has too much short-form programming,” O’Neill says.

Bruce Lefkowitz, executive vice-president of ad sales for Fox Networks Group, agrees that no matter how much TV ends up getting consumed on phones, bite-sized shows won’t take over the

industry. “We’re not going to see ten-minute sitcoms,” he says. “It takes a certain amount of time to tell certain types of stories.”

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HEN IT COMES TO SHORTENING ALL THINGS TV, THE MIGRATION TO MOBILE IS JUST THE TIP OF THE SPEAR. IT’S THE BROADER PARADIGM SHIFT OF DIGITAL ECONOMICS — WHICH TEND TO FAVOR SUBSCRIPTION-BASED MONETIZATION OVER AD-BASED MODELS — THAT SEEMS TO BE DRIVING BREVITY. Back when Family buoyed ABC’s primetime fortunes, producers and networks had a captive audience of more than 20 million viewers at an appointed time. Spelling’s Pasadena-based Lawrence family generally had fifty minutes a week to laugh, cry, love and share, leaving ten minutes per episode for twenty thirty-second commercials.

With Spelling and 20th Century Fox cranking out twenty-three episodes in 1977-78, ABC was able to keep Nielsen ratings and commercial inventory high by running originals from early September through mid-May, with a few long breaks set aside in October, December and March. In the summer, reruns ran largely unchallenged by a nascent cable programming universe.

From September 7, 1977, to September 14, 1978, 1,150 original minutes of Family provided ABC a robust, critically lauded year-round platform to sell national advertising.

Amazon’s Lewis ponders the prospect of catching up on a show like that through bingeing: “For an older show, where you might have ten seasons of twenty-six episodes, you’re talking about a pretty daunting hill to climb.”

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HEN WE THINK OF TV SHOWS GETTING SHORTER, WE GENERALLY THINK OF THE SHIFT TO MOBILE PLATFORMS. THE BIGGER DRIVER OF SHORTER SEASONS, HOWEVER, IS PROBABLY THE EMERGENCE OF SUBSCRIPTION VIDEO-ON-DEMAND (SVOD) PLATFORMS LIKE NETFLIX, HULU AND AMAZON. Let’s not forget that linear cable disrupted the traditional season format first. Seminal originals like FX’s The Shield debuted a thirteen-

episode format that would eventually become the industry standard. For networks making their first attempts at original shows, thirteenepisode commitments seemed like, in NFL parlance, a safer throw.

Moreover, since cable networks derived a large chunk of their revenue from pay-TV subscriber carriage, and not just commercials, their primary economic agenda was to create demand and brand power for their channels. Short, uninterrupted seasons allowed cable networks to compete with broadcasters, targeting areas on the calendar where the Big Four’s twenty-twoepisode campaigns were fallow.

Beyond that, the shorter season format attracted name-brand creators who had previously resisted TV’s ad-driven storytelling requirements, not to mention schedule demands.

Big-name on-screen talent, meanwhile, could fit shorter seasons into schedules that also included feature films and other TV shows.

Things started to change again around 2010, when programmers like FX and AMC began eagerly selling their hit original series, such as Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad, to Netflix.

Those licensing deals were found money in the emerging field of digital distribution.

But then, quite suddenly, Nielsen numbers on these so-called linear networks started to drop sharply, particularly for repeat shows. Viewers, who had fallen in love just ten years earlier with the ad-skipping capabilities of their DVRs, discovered that what they liked even better was watching shows on subscription streaming platforms with no commercials at all. What’s more, they liked consuming entire seasons of these shows in just a few sittings.

Driven by the quarterly earnings pressure of their media conglomerate parents, some of the major cable networks had knee-jerk responses — they shortened their programming to cram in more commercials and thus offset the revenue decline caused by smaller audiences.

From 2009 to 2013, the time set aside for commercials on the average hour-long show on the average cable network grew from fourteen minutes, twenty-seven seconds to fifteen minutes, thirty-eight seconds. On the major broadcast networks, it increased from thirteen minutes, twenty-five seconds to fourteen minutes, fifteen seconds.

This growing commercial quota created a vicious cycle. The more the linear networks packed their shows with ads, the more viewers they drove to Netflix, which nearly quadrupled its subscription base from 12.27 million in 2009 to 47.35 million in 2013.

It was right around this time that Netflix and Amazon established themselves as destinations for original shows — and bingeing became a thing.

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VOD SERIES CREATORS DIDN’T NEED TO CONCERN THEMSELVES WITH COMMERCIAL INVENTORY. THE GOAL FOR NETFLIX AND AMAZON WAS AND REMAINS PURELY TO DRIVE SUBSCRIBER SIGN-UPS, BOTH AT HOME AND ABROAD. PRODUCERS LAUD THE CREATIVE FREEDOM THEY’VE FOUND WORKING FOR THE SILICON VALLEY SVOD GIANTS. THEIR ONLY REAL MARCHING ORDER IS TO CREATE NARRATIVELY CONCISE SEASONS WITH A LIMITED NUMBER OF EPISODES THAT CAN BE CONSUMED IN MULTIPLES, LIKE CHAPTERS IN A BOOK.

“If you look at all art forms — painting, film, novel writing — the idea that there’s this set structure where you tell the artist to make the painting so big or the novel so many pages… that only exists in TV,” Lewis says. “It should be driven by creators and the story they want to tell.”

“New players in the OTT [over-the-top] and digital space, particularly those like Netflix, Amazon or Hulu, are drivers of shorter seasons for TV series,” Sappington says. “In many cases, these players pick up front-end orders of only thirteen episodes rather than full twenty-two or twenty-four episode seasons.”

Netflix’s first original hit, House of Cards, kept cable’s thirteen-episode season arc intact.

But newer Netflix originals such as Narcos and The Crown are being produced in ten-episode installments. On Amazon’s SVOD platform, the ten-episode season has been fairly standard for several years; original standouts such as Transparent and The Man in the High Castle are both set at that length.

“I don’t think there is a standard,” Lewis explains, noting that Amazon’s creators have no mandate for season length. “Some shows are ten episodes, and some are six. On a practical level, eight to ten episodes is probably a nice amount.”

The major SVOD services, in turn, seem to have influenced cable networks. AMC’s Better Call Saul, for instance, also runs in ten-episode seasons. So does HBO’s Ballers.

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EANWHILE, BACK ON THE LINEAR NETWORKS, THE AD MODEL CONTINUES TO COLLAPSE, RESULTING IN YET ANOTHER SHORTENING OF A TIMEHONORED TELEVISION STAPLE, THE COMMERCIAL. LEFKOWITZ AND HIS TEAM AT FOX NETWORKS GROUP RECENTLY TOOK A PAGE FROM YOUTUBE’S PLAYBOOK AND BEGAN OFFERING SIX-SECOND SPOTS TO SPONSORS.

“If you’re a car maker and you want to talk about Corinthian leather, six seconds probably isn’t going to be enough for you,” Lefkowitz says.

“But it’s plenty of time if you’re T-Mobile and all you need to tell people is that you don’t charge additional fees.”

So the commercials are getting shorter, and in some cases, they’re disappearing altogether.

FX and AMC both just launched ad-free versions of their networks that are being carried by cable operators including Comcast and Cox Communications. Viewers can access these channels for an extra $4.99 subscription fee on top of their existing cable bill.

But even at the major broadcast networks, commercials matter less and less these days.

In October, 20th Century Fox Television — which produces This Is Us for NBC — announced a huge sale of the series to Hulu, garnering a reported $3.5 million an episode.

Beyond the sales price, the transaction was notable for several reasons. For one, it showed that traditional TV production shops like 20th Century Fox Television and its partners at NBCUniversal (a subsidiary of telecom giant Comcast) aren’t going to stand by anymore and let Netflix take over TV with a programming budget that has swelled to $7 billion. Since both media companies are part owners of Hulu, they essentially kept This Is Us in the family.

For another, that lofty sales price changes the core economics, with a huge portion of the show’s revenue now coming from subscriptionbased, on-demand viewing. In the near future, if so much revenue comes from subscription streaming, will production companies and series creators still craft their hits in eighteen-episode arcs tailored to the ad-driven, nine-month-long needs of broadcasters? One might ask the same question about ad-free FX and AMC. Flipping the script, what if an Amazon creator wanted to shoot a twenty-three-episode season? Lewis says, “I would sit down and ask why they think that is the right amount of episodes to tell their story.”

LARRY BUSACCA/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK

Unscripted moments, like Gina Rodriguez’s touching acceptance speech of two years ago, keep viewers returning to the Golden Globes.

Executive-producing the 75th go-round on January 7 will be Allen Shapiro, Mike Mahan and Barry Adelman, CEO, president and executive vice-president of television, respectively, at Dick Clark Productions.

“They always put at least one person on the map,” Gina Rodriguez says of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awarded her a Golden Globe in her show’s first season. Now known for its prescient picks and not just its great parties, the group will be back at the Beverly Hilton for its seventy-fifth awards — and more happy surprises.

MAP TO THE

STARS

BY CRAIG TOMASHOFF

HEN GINA RODRIGUEZ TOOK THE GOLDEN GLOBE IN FOR BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL OR COMEDY SERIES, SHE TOPPED SOME SERIOUS COMPETITORS: LENA DUNHAM, EDIE FALCO, TAYLOR SCHILLING AND JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS, WHO IS NOW SITTING ON A SIX-YEAR EMMY-WINNING STREAK FOR VEEP.

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Accepting her golden statuette from Bryan Cranston and Kerry Washington, the star of the CW’s Jane the Virgin enthralled the audience — in the Beverly Hilton International Ballroom and millions more watching around the world — with her brief but soulful remarks. After expressing thanks to God, executives at CBS and the CW, her parents and sisters, her fellow cast and crew, she said: “This award is so much more than myself. It represents a culture that wants to see themselves as heroes. My father used to tell me to say every morning, ‘Today’s going to be a great day. I can and I will!’ Well, today’s a great day. I can and I did!”

Rodriguez’s victory — on her first nomination, in the first season of her show — was indeed surprising. But the Golden Globes is known for that, as Rodriguez herself acknowledges: “Every year it’s the Globes voters who discover new talent. They always put at least one person on the map.”

Indeed, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which administers the Golden Globes, has become known for much more than throwing a great party. The organization is relatively small — some ninety journalists who write about television and film for outlets around the world — but its influence on TV increases every year, thanks in large part to its tendency to champion critically acclaimed but lesser-watched shows and performances.

Lately, it seems that there’s a happy surprise every year: Netflix’s The Crown and USA’s Mr. Robot took the award for best television series, drama, in 2016 and 2015, respectively; recent winners for best musical or comedy series include Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle and Fox’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

“The HFPA was ahead of the curve as the first organization to truly recognize and reward the work that the CW has been doing recently,” says the network’s president, Mark Pedowitz, who — a year after Rodriguez’s win — celebrated again when Rachel Bloom, star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, was named best actress in a comedy. “The perception of the CW has genuinely shifted, and we’re now a part of the annual award consideration conversation.”

The HFPA downplays its role in promoting new programming. “We are not specifically looking for new shows to champion,” says the group’s president, Meher Tatna, a native of Mumbai, India, who currently contributes to the Singapore daily The New Paper. “We recognize good work, and there is plenty of it in this Golden Age of television.”

Still, there’s no denying the increasing importance of the Globes in the industry awards calendar.

“Every boss I’ve ever had at a network and every client I’ve ever worked

SPANNING THE GLOBES What comes to mind when the stars think of the Golden Globes?

Some winners, nominees — and watchers — share their thoughts.

“My first Golden Globe nomination was for Malcolm in the Middle. It was a total shock and the first nomination I’d ever received for anything.

I didn’t win, but as my wife and I were heading off to one of the parties afterward, the exodus of famous people from the ballroom came to a grinding halt. I tried to abide by the specific instructions given to us: ‘Please don’t stop to

sign, one of the girls asked a simple question: ‘Who are you?’

“Robin burst out laughing. I was momentarily thrown. I looked at their innocently sincere faces, waiting for an answer. I smiled, wrote into their books, handed it back to them, and said thank you as we slowly moved on to the party.

Robin asked what I had written. I said, ‘It was nice to meet you. Love, Tom Cruise.’”

DEBRA MESSING

sign autographs in the hotel. It will clog up the line and create a fire hazard in the lobby.’ The line wasn’t moving anyway.

“Two teenage girls were begging me to sign their autograph books. I whispered apologies that I couldn’t. They persisted. I looked to my wife, Robin, who cocked her head as if to say, ‘Why not?’ The line still wasn’t moving, so I slid over to the containment rope and held out my hand low to slyly receive their books.

I was tickled that they so desperately wanted my signature as a keepsake. They were now beaming with joy. As I lifted the first book to 46 EMMY

“When I think of the Golden Globes, I think of the entire cast and creators of Will & Grace sitting at our table, and year after year — maybe seven years in a row — losing our category.

Every time we lost, we would yell, lift all of our champagne glasses and take a swig. I would immediately dig into this little box of chocolates because I had to fit into my dress and now it didn’t matter.

“This became a running joke on the set of Will & Grace. I believe we were nominated for twenty-seven Golden Globes and we didn’t win one. By the end we knew it wasn’t going to go our way, so we had the champagne glasses ready. But we loved it every year, and we were so thrilled to be there.”

ELISABETH MOSS “Well, it’s hard not to think of [2014,] the year I won for Top of the Lake. Still, the best moment of that night for me was when I introduced myself to Helen Mirren, who was sitting at the

same table, and she looked up and said, ‘I know who the fuck you are!’

“That she knew who I was blew me away, and the line was perfection — exactly what I would have wanted her to say. She then came up to me after I won and was so kind and awesome and congratulated me. Winning the award was such an honor, but getting to meet one of my heroes and having those exchanges with her certainly rivaled it for me.”

NICOLE KIDMAN “I’ll never forget the support the Globes gave us when Jonathan Glazer’s film Birth came out.

It was not popular, despite the fact that now, almost fifteen years later, it is one of my performances people mention to me most. I love the Globes’ spirit of independence, the fact that they’re never afraid to follow the beat of their own drummer. They’ve offered great creative validation to me over the years, going all the way

IMAGE GROUP LA

BRYAN CRANSTON

with let me know they were in pursuit of a Golden Globe nomination,” says veteran network publicist Richard Licata, who now runs his own marketing firm, Licata & Co. “It bothers me when some pundits talk about the Globes as if it were just a food-and-drink affair. The HFPA members are really serious about television.”

Licata notes that networks and studios now regularly hire “consultants by the dozen” to shepherd shows through the Globes nominations and voting process. And he’s seen how helpful a Globe can be, going back to his days promoting a new USA series, Monk, starring Tony Shalhoub.

“We were a fledgling network,” he recalls. “I showed them the series in November, Tony was nominated in December, he won in January and he went on to win three Emmys. The Globes recognizing you can springboard you into the Emmy derby.”

Barry Adelman — who has been Emmy-nominated ten times as an executive producer and writer of the Golden Globes — will be exec-producing the upcoming ceremony, the seventy-fifth, when it airs live on NBC from the Beverly Hilton on January 7. As executive vice-president, television, at Dick Clark Productions, which has produced the Globes since 1983, he has heard often from actors and showrunners about the importance of the award to

back to Billy Bathgate and the nomination that told me I could be taken seriously as an actor.”

SALMA HAYEK “The best Globes memory for me was when we were nominated for Ugly Betty. I was very excited to go and I started in December looking for a dress. But I started bloating up abnormally fast, growing by the minute even though I wasn’t eating that much. I’d try a dress on, and the next week it wouldn’t fit anymore.

“Then, a few days before the Globes, I found out that I was pregnant. It was really early in the pregnancy, so I couldn’t tell anybody. I just had to get a dress that stretched and be quiet about it, no matter what anyone said. It was nerve-wracking, but we won [for best television series, comedy or musical] so maybe it was a good-luck charm. The only problem was, I knew I couldn’t drink and celebrate.”

their careers. And that, he believes, stems from the HFPA’s interest in the avant-garde. “They break a lot of ground, so when they recognize you, it really means something. They are always looking for cutting-edge performances and productions.”

The way Licata sees it, that likely stems from the fact that HFPA voters write for international publications. They have, he theorizes, “a much broader palette — they’re more likely to have culturally been exposed to a lot of different film and TV products. That’s why we witness them pulling something out of obscurity and bringing it to the world’s attention.”

That open-mindedness then filters into the consciousness of the casual TV viewer, who tunes in to the Globes “to see a kind of review of the whole year in entertainment,” Adelman explains. “The show brings them up to speed on popular culture.” And the ensuing TV party to celebrate the gems that the HFPA has uncovered? Says Licata: “That’s the cherry on top of a very serious award.”

Often, though, that cherry seems to garnish a nice, strong cocktail.

“What makes the Globes such a memorable event?” muses Will & Grace star Sean Hayes. “It’s always having to look up who won the next day after the hangover wears off.”

time [in 1998] that Christine Lahti was late to accept her award because she was in the bathroom. It happened when I was a kid, and it was the first time I realized that fancy Hollywood people went to the bathroom like everybody else. Up until that point, I had pictured that all of them reigned from on high like Greek gods, and servants held golden bedpans under them whenever they had to make a pee or doody.”

SEAN HAYES “The first Globes experience that comes to mind for me? Every year, after the ceremony, a few writers and I — still formally dressed — would go to McDonald’s to celebrate not winning.”

TONY HALE

alongside my entire cast, celebrating our show’s nomination. It was like something out of a dream — I think the very idea that it’s an elegant and elevated event but a much more relaxed evening, makes it a standout to anyone lucky enough to attend.”

“After I received my Golden Globe for Transparent [in 2015], I was standing off stage in a state of shock. It was then that I got a text from Garry Shandling. It said, ‘I’m standing in my living room crying.’ Garry was my mentor and dear friend and the kindest of geniuses. I will never forget that moment.”

“One of the greatest Golden Globe moments I’ve seen was when two-time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey took the stage to present the award for best motion picture comedy in 2016. He opened with, ‘I don’t just dream any old dream. No sir. I dream of being three-time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey… because then I would be enough….’

“So unexpected, so sincere, so profound, so perfect. If we don’t check the hamster wheel of ambition in ourselves, it will always ‘never be enough.’”

RACHEL BLOOM

MANDY MOORE

“Two things come to mind from last year….

First, all the big film people sat closest to the stage in a square, and the TV people sat just above and around them in a peasants’ gallery.

It works out well, as you have a great vantage point for spotting heroes and elbowing neighbors about those sightings. The second thing I’ll never forget is how for all the raucous, loud, alcohol-fueled fun, the silence when Meryl Streep spoke was deafening.”

“Even though I won a Golden Globe [in 2016], I always associate that awards show with the

“I can’t help but recall last year’s ceremony: being a first-time nominee, getting to sit

Additional reporting by Sarah Hirsch

JEFFREY TAMBOR

MATTHEW RHYS

TelevisionAcademy.com

47

To spark changes in television industry practices, a philanthropy challenged creators to audition and cast more actors with disabilities in the most recent pilot season. The results are in, and they’re… underwhelming. But across the industry, activists, producers and others are striving to dispel the myths surrounding persons with disabilities — who make up 20 percent of the U.S. population.

SEASON OF CHANGE

BY LIBBY SLATE

W

HEN SCOTT BAKULA AND DARYL “CHILL” MITCHELL HEAD OUT OF THEIR OFFICE, CHATTING, ON CBS’S NCIS: NEW ORLEANS, THE BLOCKING LOOKS FAMILIAR: IT’S A TRADITIONAL TV “WALK-AND-TALK.” Except Mitchell — who plays computer specialist Patton Plame — uses a wheelchair, the result of a paralyzing motorcycle accident in 2001. At the office driveway, which is too steep and narrow for Mitchell to navigate without tipping forward, Bakula — who stars as special agent Dwayne Pride — nonchalantly tilts the chair in a wheelie and they continue on their way.

“The producers decided they needed someone to be wisecracking, so they called me,” says Mitchell, who starred in and produced the 2009 Fox comedy Brothers. “It wasn’t about the wheelchair. It was about the wit and the sarcasm.”

Performing scenes without fanfare and being recognized for acting ability are precisely the goals of performers who, like Mitchell, have a disability — that is, if they can get hired at all. While some 20 percent of the U.S. population has a disability — defined as any condition that limits one or more of a person’s daily activities — in 2016, less than 2 percent of the characters in scripted television were disabled, and of those roles, only 5 percent were played by performers with a disability.

Besides Mitchell, disabled performers include Peter Dinklage, the Emmy Award–winning little person of HBO’s Game of Thrones; Micah Fowler of ABC’s Speechless, who has cerebral palsy; little person Meredith Eaton of CBS’s MacGyver and Gaten Matarazzo of Netflix’s Stranger Things, who has the genetic condition cleidocranial dysplasia, which affects bones and teeth.

Freeform’s Switched at Birth — whose cast included Deaf actress Marlee Matlin and hard-of-hearing actress Katie Leclerc — wrapped its five-season run this year. And at the CBS daytime soap The Bold and the Beautiful, little person Danny Woodburn recently joined the cast.

They may soon have more company, thanks to efforts by disability activists and independent casting directors as well as diversity departments and casting directors at networks and studios.

48 EMMY

The Television Academy, too, is on board. After this past June’s Academy Honors (which celebrates socially conscious programs), Speechless creator Scott Silveri received widespread media attention for his acceptance speech exhorting others to cast actors with disabilities. And at the 69th Emmys in September, Academy chairman Hayma Washington noted disability as one of the indicators of television’s inclusiveness.

“Inclusion is defining television more and more,” Washington said, in re-

COURTESY CBS

“It wasn’t about the wheelchair,” actor Daryl “Chill” Mitchell says of his casting in CBS’s NCIS: New Orleans; here, he performs a scene with star Scott Bakula and guest actress Lilli Birdsell.

marks from the stage of L.A.’s Microsoft Theater. “When it comes to issues of creed, color or disability, of sexual orientation or gender identity, the television community embraces you and the stories you choose to create. The face of creativity is changing.”

That assertion is embraced by longtime disability advocate Tari Hartman Squire, co-creator with Loreen Arbus — a writer-producer and fellow activist — of the Lights! Camera! Access! 2.0 Collaborative (LCA2.0), which seeks to increase

employment of persons with disabilities in front of and behind the camera, while also improving their portrayals on television and other media platforms.

“Media, particularly television, has the power to shatter myths or reinforce stereotypes,” Squire says. “When it comes to disability, that’s very powerful.”

Change can’t come too soon for her or for Arbus, whose foundation funds the annual $10,000 Focus on Disability Scholarship, announced at the Television Academy Foundation’s College Television Awards.

TelevisionAcademy.com

49

P

ERHAPS THE LCA2.0 PARTNERSHIP WITH THE WIDEST POTENTIAL IMPACT ON THE TELEVISION INDUSTRY IS THE RUDERMAN TV CHALLENGE, CONDUCTED WITH THE RUDERMAN FAMILY FOUNDATION, A BOSTON-BASED PHILANTHROPY THAT ADVOCATES FOR THE INCLUSION OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES THROUGHOUT SOCIETY. In a study published in July 2016, “The Ruderman White Paper on the Employment of Actors with Disabilities,” the foundation reported those now-familiar, dismal statistics on characters and casting (Danny Woodburn coauthored the study with the foundation’s Kristina Kopić). The foundation examined the frequency of casting actors with disabilities on the top ten television shows and top twenty-one original streaming shows near the end of the 2015–16 TV season, and surveyed actors with disabilities about their experiences in television.

“We had begun to look at the issue of entertainment having an impact, of television having the ability to shape attitudes,” explains foundation president Jay Ruderman. “Ellen and Will & Grace had changed people’s attitudes toward the LGBTQ community. We’d been in the practice of producing white papers.

We reached out to Danny after he’d written a passionate piece for the Huffington Post.”

In November 2016, the foundation followed up the white paper with an L.A. event, the Ruderman Studio-Wide Roundtable on Disability Inclusion, where actors and advocates addressed an audience with representatives of the studios, networks and guilds.

When Ruderman reached out to LCA2.0 for its next phase, Squire suggested a call to action that became known as the TV Challenge. In an announcement this past February, television content creators were asked to audition and cast more performers with disabilities for the 2017–18 pilot season.

“We talked about casting actors with disabilities for all roles, including ‘under fives’ [per SAG-AFTRA, no more than five lines of dialogue and fewer than fifty words],” Squire says. “That opens up the doors for newcomers with disabilities, for the nondescript roles that go to non-disabled performers — banker, teacher, judge, neighbor.”

50 EMMY

TOP: NIV SHANK; BOTTOM: ©LA COUTURE PRODUCTION 2017/ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

“I always open my speeches with the same line,” Arbus relates. “‘Could I see through a show of hands if you know what is the largest minority in the world?’ It’s people with disabilities. Television is reaching everyone [through the internet]. We need to be inclusive. It’s an absolute scandal that less than 2 percent of characters have disabilities.”

LCA2.0 has its roots in a one-day summit hosted in 2010 by the Television Academy’s diversity committee and appropriately dubbed Lights!

Camera! Access! The forum brought together leaders in the entertainment and disability communities as well as government officials like Hilda Solis, then secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor. Squire, via her EIN SOF Communications, subsequently joined forces with Arbus to seize the momentum of the summit and to help people with disabilities launch and fortify careers in entertainment and media.

The collaborative produces events in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, with discussions on how to carve out an industry career and activities such as résumé reviews, flash mentoring and job interviews.

With the American Association of Advertising Agencies, it is developing the first employment and portrayals resource guide for advertisers looking to tap talent with disabilities.

Other collaborations include: “Stories About Us,” a campaign created

by BBDO New York to solicit fiction by writers with disabilities; a customized curriculum for aspiring media professionals with disabilities by PolicyWorks; the Media Mentoring Opportunity Pipeline with Cornell University and the National Disability Mentoring Coalition; with Deaf Film Camp and Inclusion Films Workshop, increased career opportunities; plus a CBS News–LCA 2.0– DisBeat internship for college students with disabilities, now in its third year.

Top: “Behind the Camera” panelists at the Ruderman Family Foundation’s studio-wide roundtable, held in November 2016 ; above: LCA2.0 partners and panelists at the CBS–LCA2.0 networking and flash mentoring event in April 2017

The TV Challenge spent several months building awareness of its disability casting mission, through captioned videos, social media and email blasts to industry and disability entities, as well as events in Hollywood with CBS and the Caucus for Producers, Writers & Directors and at a disability panel at the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas in May. A list of disabilityrelated resources was also available on the foundation website.

Next came the data gathering — from sources including casting directors, agents and a survey of performers with disabilities — and then data analysis.

The results of the performer survey were overwhelmingly negative.

One anonymous performer wrote: “I would still describe entry into TV/film acting for actors with disabilities as virtually impossible. If one only auditions a handful of times per year, it is difficult to build on the audition experience to improve one’s technique. The auditions become much more important, because one is aware the opportunity is very rare. Even the best actors would find it hard to work under those circumstances, yet we do. It is that much more frustrating when you do well, and they still cast a non-disabled actor.”

Geri Jewell, who has cerebral palsy, wrote: “I was the first person with a visible disability ever to be cast in a primetime series, the role of Cousin Geri on the NBC sitcom The Facts of Life. I also received Emmy consideration for my role of Jewel on HBO’s Deadwood. In my career that goes back four decades, I have been sent out on fewer than forty auditions.”

There were some positive comments as well.

An unnamed actress wrote: “In [HBO’s] Oz, I was hired as an everyday soccer mom, the wife of a man who needed a new kidney. The role had nothing to do with disability and, in fact, I was sitting the whole time, so no disability was even shown. A fine example of hiring a PWD [person with a disability] for a nondescript, non-specific role, simply because she was the right actor for the role, regardless of disability.”

This past September, the foundation released its results in “The Ruderman White Paper on the Challenge to Create More Authentic Disability Casting and Representation on TV,” coauthored by Kopić, Squire and Mitchell.

The study reported that 151 pilots on thirty-nine platforms — including broadcast, cable and streaming services — were cast during the 2017–18

pilot season. The broadcast network hiring the most performers with disabilities for scripted shows was CBS, which hired actors with disabilities for eleven series and/or pilots; the leading cable network was HBO, with three; and among streamers, Hulu, also led with three.

In addition, 20th Century Fox Television led in auditioning talent with disabilities, doing so for fourteen of its twenty-three dramas and nine of its thirteen comedies.

At CBS, under Tiffany Smith-Anoa’i, executive vice-president of entertainment diversity, inclusion and communications for CBS Entertainment, the network had its own initiatives in place prior to the Ruderman TV Challenge. For one, the wording on casting breakdowns sent to agents was changed, according to Fern Orenstein, senior vice-president, talent and casting, for CBS Entertainment.

“The breakdown used to say, ‘Please submit all ethnicities,’” Orenstein explains. “Now it also says, ‘Please include people with disabilities.’”

In April, a CBS–LCA2.0 event dubbed “Disability Visibility Hollywood” drew at least eighty people, Smith-Anoa’i reports, including casting directors and human-resources executives. Out of that event, actress Dawn Grabowski, who uses crutches and a wheelchair, booked a role on S.W.A.T. The network also holds a diversity showcase for performers and sketch comedy writers over several evenings each January.

Fox, too, had had pre-Challenge initiatives. In 2015, its casting and labor relations departments organized a roundtable for actors with disabilities, which has led thus far to the casting of sixteen performers, including Micah Fowler in Speechless. Another event is in the works.

“We’ve always encouraged our casting directors and producers to consider everyone for every role, as well as to create characters specifically for performers with disabilities,” says Sharon Klein, executive vice-president of casting at Fox Television Group. “We are absolutely committed to improving opportunities for these performers.”

T

HE RUDERMAN TV CHALLENGE DELIBERATELY SEPARATED DRAMAS AND COMEDIES, IN PART BECAUSE COMEDIES ARE USUALLY SHOT ON SOUNDSTAGES WHILE DRAMAS ARE MORE APT TO USE LOCATIONS THAT PRODUCERS ASSUME — OFTEN WRONGLY — CAN PRESENT PROBLEMS FOR ACTORS WITH DISABILITIES. As Mitchell points out, “They have to get [crew] guys in and out of there. A lot of times, I use the sound cart that has rollers. We worked on Bourbon Street [in New Orleans], where they don’t have elevators in those old buildings. Sometimes the crew helped me with the steps. It’s not rocket science. If a ramp has to be built, it will be built.”

The TV Challenge has sparked some negative reactions, Jay Ruderman acknowledges. “A director came back at me that we were infringing on artistic freedom. It’s not about that, when you have less than 2 percent of characters with disabilities being shown.”

Overall, though, response has been positive. And there have been encouraging developments. Zach Anner, an actor with cerebral palsy cast on Speechless last season, was invited into the writers’ room this season on the ABC show. Members of the Casting Society of America plan to invite performers with disabilities to an open house at their offices in the U.S. and Canada in January, according to Russell Boast, CSA vice-president and head of the CSA inclusion and diversity committee; the CSA is also creating a guide to disabled performers for casting directors.

Meanwhile, LCA2.0 is expanding its summits to Boston, Chicago, Orlando and Silicon Valley, among other locales. And at press time, the Ruderman Family Foundation is presenting an inclusion summit for Boston on November 19–20.

“Change isn’t going to happen overnight,” Ruderman says. “It will be incremental, season by season. I don’t think television should ever discount its impact on people’s lives — it has a big impact on how people see themselves. That should be front of mind at all times.”

MYTHBUSTERS

Behind the camera, these industry pros have built careers while breaking down stereotypes.

KAITLYN YANG

VISUAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR In 2010, Yang became the first student selected for an internship in special visual effects in the Television Academy Foundation’s summer internship program.

In 2013 she opened her own business, Alpha Studios in Burbank, California. She uses a motorized wheelchair due to spinal muscular atrophy.

“Disability does carry a negative connotation. It’s a fact. My friends just think of it as a part of me, like having brown hair, but in Hollywood, it’s a double-edged sword. Should I bring it up to potential clients? They would have already looked at my reels before my meeting them. I address it on a case-by-case basis.

“When I come in a room, I need to prove myself; I need to do a better job.

I’ve gotten turned away, and I have a hunch it’s because of my disability. Once, the meeting place turned out not to be wheelchair-accessible. I asked if we could meet at the place next door.

“I had to go to the mountains once. I said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m in a wheelchair.’ They said, ‘Okay. Do you want to park close?’ They didn’t make a fuss about it. I wish more people were like that.

“As far as how the disability affects my work, you’re basically sitting in front of the computer ten hours a day. I’m already sitting, and I have my own chair. To people in the industry, I’d say, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover. Don’t judge abilities and artistic vision based on what you see on the outside.’”

JIM LeBRECHT

SOUND DESIGNER

From his base in Berkeley, California, LeBrecht has carved a niche as a sound designer for documentaries; he has headed his own company, Berkeley Sound Artists, since 1996. He is producing and directing a documentary, Crip Camp, about a summer camp for teenagers with disabilities. He uses a motorized wheelchair due to spina bifida.

“I’ve been working the last few years on a sitcom I created, a comedy with a male character who is a wheelchair user. The comments I’ve gotten are: You’re never going to get it produced, the insurance is too difficult and who are you going to cast?

“These responses are based on stereotypes, preconceived notions that are wrong and can be damaging. We [persons with disabilities] work. I work fourteen to sixteen hours a day.

“I think the vast majority of people don’t know the disability community exists. We take pride as people with disabilities. Yet we’re the ‘other.’ We’re marginalized. A lot of that has to do with the fear of the unknown, feeling uncomfortable not knowing how to talk to a person with a disability.

“Except for a few television shows, you don’t see people with disabilities as part of the fabric of society. If you don’t see someone like you participating in life, you can assume a better life isn’t available to you.

“I [spoke on] the panel for the LCA2.0–CBS event [“Disability Visibility Hollywood”]. I felt like a role model. Obviously I’m a wheelchair user, but I’ve crafted a career in entertainment. If I can do it, so can you.” —L.S.

CHARLES MANLEY

Foundation Interviews

[ Horace Newcomb]

RLY 500 ORIGINAL SERIES CH ON TELEVISION’S EVEREED A QUAINT NOTION THAT THE MEDIUM’S SEMINAL ACADEMIC GREW UP WITH A TWENTY-ONE-INCH BLACK-AND-WHITE ZENITH. BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT WAS FOR HORACE NEWCOMB IN SMALL-TOWN MISSISSIPPI. HE WOULD GAIN PROMINENCE IN A BRAND-NEW ACADEMIC FIELD — TELEVISION STUDIES — AND EVENTUALLY BECOME THE DIRECTOR OF THE PRESTIGIOUS PEABODY AWARDS. BUT HE STARTED OUT WATCHING THE LIKES OF THE DEFENDERS AND ROUTE 66 ON THAT LITTLE SET. Even when his family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, “we lived in the suburbs,” he recalls. “There was no way to get to a movie. My family watched TV each night.” Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon and Dragnet’s Joe Friday “instructed me to beware the use of violence,” Newcomb has written. “Documentaries and news reports on the civil rights

movement offered a direction I might otherwise have never known — and challenged me to go that way.”

His way included a master’s degree in humanities and a PhD in English, both from the University of Chicago. Those led to positions at colleges in Iowa, Michigan, Maryland and eventually, twenty-three years at the

University of Texas, Austin, initially in the English department and later in radio-TV-film.

Newcomb “didn’t single-handedly invent television studies,” critic Noel Holston has written, “but he advanced and formalized the field with a blueprint book, TV: The Most Popular Art, first published in 1974. It influenced a

53

Foundation Interviews

Horace Newcomb at the Peabody Awards with Walter Cronkite...

generation of academics, critics and viewers.”

The back cover of that book offered a view startling for the time: “The phrase ‘television art’ may strike people as a contradiction in terms, but this book shows that I Love Lucy and All in the Family can, in fact be appreciated aesthetically.”

His 1976 anthology, Television: The Critical View, would go through seven editions. In 1983 (with coauthor Robert S. Alley), he charted the ascendancy of the television producer in The Producer’s Medium: Conversations with Creators of American TV. And in 1997 he surveyed the entire medium as editor of the first edition of the Museum of Broadcast Communications’ Encyclopedia of Television, a three-volume work with some 1,900 entries.

As a juror for the Peabody Awards, he helped select the best work in television from 1989 through 1995. In 2001, when he was invited to head the Peabodys, he moved to the University of Georgia, where he remained a professor of telecommunications until 2013.

Newcomb was interviewed in February by Adrienne Faillace, producer of The Interviews: An Oral History of Television, a program of the Television Academy Foundation. The following is an edited excerpt of their conversation. The entire discussion may be screened at TelevisionAcademy.com/Interviews.

Q: Why did you want to study television?

A: From high school in Clinton, Mississippi, I went a few blocks away to Mississippi Col54 EMMY

lege, a Southern Baptist–affiliated school. At that time, it was very clear to me that the racial situation was untenable in Mississippi — and throughout the South and throughout the country.

Television was a huge part of that. I didn’t realize for a number of years how significant it had been — it was probably after I began to write and teach about television. I tell people now — and I’ve written this in autobiographical essays — that one reason I attended so much to television in my career was because it changed my life.

I’m convinced that watching shows like The Defenders, which week after week was treating social-justice issues, awakened a consciousness in me. Watching Matt Dillon defend the Chinese laundrymen from being lynched, I thought, “That’s everywhere around me, even to the point of lynching….”

Seeing the Freedom Riders, the battle for civil rights… in news and fiction, television became the social and cultural center of the country. In that way television was crucial, not only for my development, but for the development of our society. People saw the same things and had to understand and react to the same things. There’s a richness there that I decided I wanted to study.

Q: What was your first work on the study of television?

A: The first paper I proposed was called “The Problem of Repetition in Television,” and it

: How did TV: The Most Popular Art me about?

I wanted to find out what had been ritten about television from the huanities point of view. I gathered as any articles and essays as I could d wrote a proposal for an anthology, a collection of articles about television from the humanities perspective. I sent it to various publishers and got very little response — except from Doubleday. An acquisitions editor there, William Whitehead, wrote back and said, “We don’t do well with anthologies. Why don’t you write a monograph about television? Write me a proposal and we’ll see how it goes.”

So I did. I wrote a proposal structured around story types — what we would call genres, but what Cawelti and I referred to as formulas. There were chapters on the situation comedy, family comedy, mysteries, doctor and lawyer shows, westerns. Whitehead liked it and sent me a contract — for an academic, a strange thing. Gave me an advance. And it was published as TV: The Most Popular Art in the Doubleday Anchor Paperback Original series.

It’s half-focused on aesthetics — narrative structures and so on — and half on cultural analysis — what are these shows saying about American culture and how are we dealing with issues, problems and provocations?

In the introduction I made a point of saying, “This is not social science. This is not economics. I’m not writing about the industry.

I’m writing about the program content.” And essentially nobody had done that in this country. Raymond Williams was doing it in Britain;

COURTESY HORACE NEWCOMB

was about formulaic storytelling problems: if you’ve watched enough [of a series], you know what’s going to happen. Toward the end of that paper, which I sent to [author–professor of popular culture] John Cawelti, I talked about soap opera as having a different narrative structure, because it doesn’t end, which changes the narrative probabilities. It allows you to do things you can’t do in episodic television, where you have to solve the crime or run off the bad guy in the western.

He wrote back, “I’m intrigued by this comment about soap opera. Why don’t you develop something around that?” So I did, and the paper became “Reflections on the Structure of Soap Opera.”

It was well received. People had not even thought about television much before. I began to think, There’s something I want to do ere.”

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Foundation Interviews

Q: How was it received?

A: It was recognized pretty quickly, not by critics, but by academics. It was taught in English departments, drama departments, even in some film studies programs.

Q: While writing TV: The Most Popular Art, you were also a TV critic for the Baltimore Morning Sun….

A: Six hundred words a day, five days a week, thirty-five bucks a column. I was teaching fulltime [at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County] and finishing my book. I had to watch a television show, write my 600 words, drive it down to the newspaper and hand it to the copy editor. Never missed a deadline.

During Watergate, I was writing about the hearings. I was reviewing them as performance in many ways. And then these shows began to appear: All in the Family was treating social issues. Mary Tyler Moore was dealing with all sorts of issues in a gentler kind of way, but in some ways more sophisticated even than All in the Family. My sense was that television was coming of age.

Despite all the wonderful things about ’50s and ’60s television, there was a sameness about it. There was very little experimentation. Then things began to change. There were people producing television who loved it, knew what they were doing and could see very clearly. Obviously Gene Roddenberry knew what he was doing with Star Trek. William Link and Richard Levinson knew what they were doing with their social-problem plays, and this was a period of the made-for-television movie doing some really wonderful things. These shows broke away from the formula — they woke up an audience. The late ’60s through the late ’70s was a period of ferment.

Q: What did TV: The Most Popular Art do for your career?

A: It made my career. I tell people, “I’ve only written one book.” I coauthored a book and I edited a lot of books, and I’ve written a lot of articles.

After The Most Popular Art, I went back to the anthology collection that I’d proposed previously, and in 1976 the first edition of Television: The Critical View came out. It took off right away.

By this time, people wanted to teach 56 EMMY

about television, and in all sorts of [college] departments. Three years later we did a second edition, and three years after that a third edition. It went through seven editions until 2001, I think, when I decided not to do it anymore, largely because by then the internet had made so much material available that people could put their own anthologies together. But Television: The Critical View had an enormous influence on the rise of television studies — it was the only book for some time that people used.

Q: When did you see television studies start to become more accepted as a field of study?

A: It’s hard to pinpoint. I think in the introduction to the sixth edition, I said something like the term television studies is now becoming more widely used, as comparable to film studies. That would have been in the late ’90s.

Now, to talk about television studies, you also have to talk about the configuration of media studies and communication studies, and it’s different in every university and college. Some departments have journalism, advertising, public relations, all in the same school or department or college, and television studies often is under the rubric of media studies. But the term is generally used by television studies scholars in opposition to the study of television from, say, the social science, political science or economics point of view.

Television studies — for the people who do it widely and best — means television studied from the perspective of the humanities, broadly defined. It can be the art of television, meaning the actual physical art direction and so on. Or it

...with Diane Sawyer...

can be narrative analysis of episodic programs.

Or it can be the history of television program content.

The focus is mainly on content, though in the past five to ten years there’s been a big shift toward industry studies, but always with the sense that, “Let’s study the industry in terms of how it influences content and how content influences the industry.” The term [encompasses] an amalgam of ways to understand, but with the humanities still at the base.

Q: How did you becomed involved with the Peabody Awards?

A: In 1989 I got a letter from Worth McDougald, a journalism professor and head of the Peabodys, asking if I would be on the board and I said, “Yes, of course.” It was one of the most exciting processes I’d ever been party to. Fifteen people sitting around a table, looking at video — at that time, VHS — saying, “Is this worthy of the most prestigious award for electronic media?”

It’s the oldest award for electronic media in the world, created for radio in 1941. The first TV award was in 1948.

Q: How did you become director of the Peabody Awards?

A: In the spring of 2000 they approached me about applying for the position of director. I thought at first that we wouldn’t do that, and I say “we” because my wife Sara and I had been in Austin for twenty-three years. I thought, “I love this university and I’ve helped build this department. I don’t think we should move.”

But after a couple of weeks I came home and said, “I think I’m going to have to apply.” They

COURTESY HORACE NEWCOMB

his book, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, came out about the same year. But The Most Popular Art was the first book that treated American television that way.

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Foundation Interviews

Q: What sets the Peabody Award apart?

A: It’s not a guild award, it’s not a peer award, it’s not voted on by people in the industry. I refer to it as a “citizen’s award” because the board is made up of people who do many different things. There are industry professionals, also newspaper people. There are usually about two academics, and I was filling that role when I was a board member. So the academic side of it, the fact that it is protected by a university — as the Pulitzer is by Columbia — is really important.

...and Jane Lynch.

offered me the position, and in 2001 we moved to Athens, Georgia, and the University of Georgia and I became the director of the Peabody Awards. It was perhaps the best position I ever held.

Q: What did you enjoy about it?

A: It was different from being strictly an academic. I taught one course a year, but mainly my job was to oversee the process of selecting these prestigious awards. Every year was a struggle because we were getting 1,000 to 1,100 entries a year, and we had never given more than thirty-five awards. We began to increase the number — I think my last year we gave thirty-six or thirty-seven — and the award goes to the show, not to an individual. The awards are not given in categories. Every entry competes with every other entry. So local news programming is up against the networks and CNN. Q: Tell us about the Peabody Archive.

A: It is the third-largest media archive in the country. Only the Library of Congress and UCLA’s Film and Television Archive are bigger.

But the Peabody is different because all of the material is submitted annually by people who say, “This was our best work.” It’s not an archive of Peabody winners. It’s all of the entries — 1,100 a year — a cross-section of 58 EMMY

Q: You were also the editor of the Museum of Broadcast Communications’ Encyclopedia of Television.

A: I took a two-year leave of absence from the University of Texas and gathered a board of advisors, who then advised on creating what’s called the “head word list” for the encyclopedia, about 1,000 entries. Then I had to find people to write these entries.

It was not something that a single writer could do — we had to have entries on the BBC, on the economics of television, on cable television, on regulation…. I commissioned these essays to around 300 people around the world, and their materials started to come in. Sara and I worked on the encyclopedia in our largest room upstairs — and this was before the internet was in wide use, so we weren’t doing this by email. People were sending us floppy discs with their material on it.

Q: What should be the mission of television?

A: There are multiple missions. Obviously the informational mission is somewhat different from the entertainment, though they do overlap at times, but in the best of worlds they are somewhat separate.

I’d like to think, particularly with the American system, that we have a public service. We serve citizens. For a period, there was an academic debate: “Television and other popular media simply serve consumers — they don’t serve citizens.” I said, “Well, citizens are consumers. Consumers are citizens. We can’t make that kind of distinction.”

In the broadest sense, the medium should serve society, the culture and the public. Entertainment has always had a public function, whether it’s in the Greek theater or Shake-

speare or the novel — it serves the public. But when you lay it out that broadly, you don’t really get much of the purpose. The purpose is to do all of that well.

Q: How have television studies changed since you started your career?

A: Partly by becoming more accepted and by recognizing different strategies for understanding this complex medium. My goal was to talk about stories, to do what we call textual analysis, to say, “Here’s an episode of All in the Family. There’s more there than meets the eye.

There is this richness to it, this complexity.”

A lot of people still do that. Entire books are written about series, which is great because we need that kind of thing.

One of the things that’s been added is attention to diversity. A lot of television studies was pushed forward by feminism, by feminist media studies. Then there’s the political aspect, which we were involved with as well, to say there’s not enough diversity.

That’s been a throughline through all of television studies.

The other big shifts have been toward history on the one hand and industry studies on the other. The real question now for television studies is, “What’s going to happen to the advertising model?” If audiences are so fragmented, what are creators going to do?

What are advertisers going to do? What are distributors going to do?

Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring television academics?

A: Find a good school, a couple of good professors and stick it out. The academic world is changing rapidly. Job markets are tight. There is a rush toward studying online media, and a number of schools now have renamed their programs “screen studies.”

I think it would be very hard for somebody to do what I did. [My success] was fortuitous — it wasn’t because I saw the future. I just liked television and wanted to write about it. That I was there early on was a great boon for me, and perhaps for the field of study. But if I were trying to write a single book about television at this point, it would be a rear-view-mirror look.

It would be, “What did television do?” And I think it did great things.

TelevisionAcademy.com/Interviews

COURTESY HORACE NEWCOMB

broadcasting, cable and increasingly digital work that was done in the previous calendar year. You can see what was submitted by date, by year, by station — it is pretty amazing. It’s a treasure and being part of it was a treasure of an experience.

THE ITALIAN TAG #FerrariTrento | www.ferraritrento.it

Engineering Emmys It’s sci highs all around at technical awards.

T

he men and women of the Television Academy’s Engineering Awards committee don’t just have a zeal for science and technology — they have a sense of humor, too.

Near the end of the 69th Engineering Emmy Awards, committee chair Barry Zegel — whose day job is senior vice-president and general manager of CBS Television City in Los Angeles — took to the podium to note, “One of the hallmarks of award shows is the In Memoriam, which recognizes the passing of industry luminaries. Our In Memoriam is not for the dear departed, but for defunct technologies. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s take a nostalgic look down memory lane.”

A subsequent three-minute video tribute, titled “To Those Who Served Us Well,” resurrected historic tape formats, cameras and recording devices, along with more

recent developments such as the 4:3 aspect ratio and 3-D television set. At the end, Zegel quipped, “I can see there’s not a dry eye in the house.”

On the contrary, everyone was in good spirits on this night, which honored individuals and corporations who, as Academy chairman Hayma Washington said in his welcome, “are passionate and excited about taking technology to new heights.” Held October 25 at Loews Hollywood Hotel, the ceremony was hosted for the second consecutive year by Kirsten Vangsness, who plays technical analyst Penelope Garcia on CBS’s Criminal Minds.

This year’s recipient of the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes a living individual whose contributions have significantly affected television technology and engineering, was Leonardo Chiariglione, considered the “father of MPEG” for his groundbreaking efforts in media compression. The acronym MPEG stands for both

the organization Moving Picture Experts Group, which Chiariglione co-founded and chairs, and for the worldwide standard for video compression and transmission.

Engineering committee member Wendy Aylsworth accepted the award on behalf of Chiariglione, who was heading an MPEG meeting in China, and read his acceptance remarks.

“I’m happy to see that the Academy has recognized my thirty years of work, dedicated to making real the vision of humans finally free to communicate without barriers, and sharing more and more rewarding digital media experiences,” Chiariglione wrote. “I consider my endeavors were driven by the hand of God, and that tens, hundreds and thousands of people have made MPEG what it is recognized for, which is the originator of standards that have changed the lives of billions of people for the better.”

Sony Corporation received the Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achievement Award, which

Academy chairman Hayma Washington and actress Kirsten Vangsness (center) with Engineering Award winners (from left) Mikio Kita, Hiroshi Kiriyama, Andy Aherne, Brian Saunders, Richard Dempsey, Jeff Miller and John Studdert

60 EMMY

Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation* 1) Publication title: emmy® 2) Publication number: 461-570 3) Filing date 10/05/17 4) Issue frequency: Feb./March/Apr./May/ June (x2)/Aug./Sept./Oct./Nov. 5) Number of issues published annually: 10 6) Annual subscription price: $37.00 7) Mailing address of office of publication: 5220 Lankershim Blvd, North Hollywood, Los Angeles County, CA 91601-3109; contact person: Gail Polevoi; phone: (818) 754-2866 8) Mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publication: 5220 Lankershim Blvd, North Hollywood, Los Angeles County, CA 91601-3109 9) Publisher: Heather Cochran, 5220 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, Los Angeles County, CA 91601-3109; editor: Gail Polevoi, 5220 Lankershim Blvd, North Hollywood, Los Angeles County, CA 91601-3109; managing editor: Maura Weber, 5220 Lankershim Blvd, North Hollywood, Los Angeles County, CA 91601-3109 10) Owner: Television Academy, 5220 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, Los Angeles County, CA 91601-3109 11) Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None 12) Tax status: The purpose, function and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes have not changed during preceding 12 months 13) Publication title: emmy® 14) Issue date for circulation data below: Issue #9, 2017 15) Extent and nature of circulation/average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months: a) Total number of copies: 25,370 b) Paid circulation by mail and outside the mail (1) Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 21,275 (2) Mailed in-county paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: N/A (3) Paid distribution outside the mails including dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other paid distribution outside USPS: 783 (4) Paid distribution by other classes of mail through the USPS: 97 c) Total paid distribution: 22,155 d) Free or nominal rate distribution by mail and outside the mail: (1) Free or nominal rate outside-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 284 (2) Free or nominal rate in-county copies included on PS Form 3541: N/A (3) Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other classes through the USPS: 150 (4) Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail: 120 e) Total free or nominal rate distribution: 554 f) Total distribution: 22,709 g) Copies not distributed: 2,661 h) Total: 25,370 i) Percent paid: 97%. No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: a) Total number of copies: 25,900 b) Paid circulation by mail and outside the mail (1) Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 23,309 (2) Mailed in-county paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: N/A (3) Paid distribution outside the mails including dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other paid distribution outside USPS: 710 (4) Paid distribution by other classes of mail through the USPS: 35 c) Total paid distribution: 24,054 d) Free or nominal rate distribution by mail and outside the mail: (1) Free or nominal rate outside-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 290 (2) Free or nominal rate in-county copies included on PS Form 3541: N/A (3) Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other classes through the USPS: 110 (4) Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail: 50 e) Total free or nominal rate distribution: 450 f) Total distribution: 24,504 g) Copies not distributed: 1,396 h) Total: 25,900 i) Percent paid: 98% 17) Publication of statement of ownership: Required 18) Signed: Gail Polevoi, Editor, 10/05/17. *Publication required by USPS.

INVISION

Academy News

Academy News

62 EMMY

ElevenEnterHall ofFame

J

ohn wells, shonda Rhimes, Roy Christopher, the late Joan Rivers and the original cast of Saturday Night Live — Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman and the late John Belushi and Gilda Radner — were inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame on November 15. The ceremony, hosted by Larry Wilmore, was held at the Academy’s Saban Media Center in North Hollywood. For details and photos, go to TelevisionAcademy.com/Hall-ofFame.

John Wells

CHRISTOPHER: SCOTT COUNCIL; WELLS: GEORGE PIMENTEL/GERRY; RHIMES: JAY GOLDMAN; SNL: PHOTOFEST; RIVERS: CHARLES BUSH

Joan Rivers

Shonda Rhimes

Roy Christopher

The original cast of Saturday Night Live

Better Late…

A

photo of writers and producers of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert that appeared in emmy’s post-awards photo edition (Issue #9, 2017, page 96) was misidentified. Seen here are: (front, from left) Rob Dubbin, Kate Sidley, Ariel Dumas, Jen Spyra, Chris Licht, Emily Gertler and Jay Katsir; (rear) Django Gold, Gabe Gronli, John Thibodeaux, Daniel Kibblesmith, Cullen Crawford, Opus Moreschi and Aaron Cohen. The Late Show was nominated as outstanding variety talk series and for outstanding writing and directing.

INVISION

recognizes an agency, company or institution whose contributions have significantly affected television technology and engineering. Among those contributions, recounted by Zegel: electric lavaliere mics, digital multi-track recording formats and equipment, audio mixers, studio tape recording formats and video production switchers and monitors.

Accepting was Mikio Kita, vicepresident of Sony’s media business, professional solutions and services group, attending from Japan.

“I direct sincere thanks to the Television Academy and Engineering Emmys committee for this amazing recognition,” Kita said.

“Our history of development is the history of Sony learning from our customers. We are proud of our past. We are opening doors to the new future. We are committed to the success of the industry.”

Seven Emmys were also bestowed. The recipients were: •The ARRI Alexa Camera System • Canon 4K zoom lenses • Fujifilm Fujinon 4K zoom lenses • The Walt Disney Studios for Disney global localization, a system that allows for the efficient creation and global release of foreign-language dubs and subtitled programming •The McDSP SA-2 Dialog Processor, used by audio mixers to fill out dialog processing limitations made by microphone placement and locations during production •The Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding for those engineers’ development of High Efficiency Video Coding (HVEC), which enables efficient delivery of ultra-high definition content over multiple distribution channels • Shotgun Software, a production management platform that streamlines collaborative broadcast, episodic animation and visual effects pipelines. —Libby Slate

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PHOTOGRAPH BY COREY NICKOLS; MAKEUP BY ZENA SHTEYSEL GREEN; HAIR BY LORI KING

Me and My Emmy

Patti Ramsey Bortoli Primetime Emmy Tally: Two How She Got the Gold: Outstanding makeup for a multi-camera series or special, for Dancing with the Stars, 2008 (with Melanie Mills, Zena Shteysel Green and Nadege Schoenfeld) and 2012 (with Shteysel Green, Angela Moos, Barbara Fonte, Sarah Woolf and Schoenfeld).

Now for the Noms: She has amassed twelve nominations: eleven for ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and one for Nickelodeon’s iCarly (2011).

Twice As Nice: “My favorite memory from Emmy night was the first time I won — and the second! Both times [our teams] were announced as winners, my knees were shaking like crazy up on stage!”

Keeping It Clean: “I’m more of an au naturel girl.... I love clean beauty, but I do

like to glam it up for award shows. I just don’t go too over-the-top with my makeup. I like to save that for jewelry and shoes.”

Star Power: “I’ve been with DWTS since the second season, and we are now on season twenty-five! We are a family there. We all shine individually with our personal strengths, and our department head [Shteysel Green] does a fantastic job knowing where to place us and who to place us with.”

That Wing Zing: “I keep my Emmys proudly displayed in our home next to my guild award and framed photos of my husband and two kids. Those golden wings on my Emmy angels get me fired up every time I look at them. They remind me that the blood, sweat and tears are all worth it.”

For more with Patti Ramsey Bortoli, go to TelevisionAcademy.com/ MyEmmy.

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