Sunday, September 20, 2015
By Rick Bentley
The Fresno Bee
LOS ANGELES
It’s time to honor the best and brightest from the past season of television with the 67th Primetime Emmy Awards, airing live tonight on Fox.
Andy Samberg, star of the Fox comedy “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” will serve as the host of this year’s event at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.
The challenge for the team behind the telecast is to preserve the tradition of the Emmy Awards while making it fresh enough to keep viewers watching.
“There are awards shows where you have fresh material every year. Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, fresh material every year. The Emmys, we have recurring shows and reality and comedic series,” says Don Mischer, executive producer of the Emmy telecast. “We know that we have to cover the bases because this is an industry show, and we try and cover those the best way we can. In the categories that are less interesting to America and to the viewers across the country, we will probably not spend as much time with those.”
It’s all a matter of making all of the awards, presenters, performances and commercials add up to the best Emmy telecast possible. Here’s a look at this year’s Emmys, by the numbers.
0Emmy Awards Jon Hamm has won from his eight nominations on “Mad Men.”
1Number of times Andy Samberg has hosted the Emmy telecast, although he was a host for the “The 21st Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards.” He wants to find the right balance: “It’s a tricky balance with awards shows when you’re hosting. You don’t want to overstay your welcome, but you don’t want to do so little that no one noticed you were there, so you try and find that medium,” Samberg says.
2Total nominations for the CW Network. One went to “Jane the Virgin” and the other to “The Flash.” The nod for “Jane” is a bit of a snub – it is a nomination for Anthony Mendex in the Outstanding Narrator category. The show didn’t get any nods in major categories. CW President Mark Pedowitz was disappointed for “Jane” and the entire CW. “The show won a Peabody Award, an AFI award, a Golden Globe nomination and TCA nominated it for best new show. We are going to have to earn it, and the whole team is out there to earn that nomination next year from the Academy and they deserved it this year,” Pedowitz says.
5Emmy Awards “Modern Family” has won for best comedy. It’s tied with “Frasier” in that category and could move ahead this year with a win. It will have to beat ”Louie,“ ”Parks and Recreation,“ ”Silicon Valley,“ ”Transparent,“ ”Veep“ and ”Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.“
8Awards given to writers and directors during the prime-time telecast. There also are six awards accepted by producers. That’s more than half of the statues handed out during the telecast. So much for seeing the stars.
15Length of an NFL overtime. The game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles will be the Fox football telecast just before the Emmy Awards. Mischer isn’t worried about the NFL game running into his telecast. “They leave a cushion for an overtime period, which I think is limited to 15 minutes in the NFL. And I don’t think I think the odds of the game actually running up to the time the Emmys start are pretty low,” Mischer says.
20This year’s awards are on Sunday instead of being shifted to Monday night like last year’s awards. The Emmy telecast rotates between four networks and when it fell to NBC last year, there was a conflict. There was no way NBC was going to bump “NFL Sunday Night” and so the awards show moved.
28Number of actors picking up their first Emmy nominations this year.
29The number of Emmys HBO has already picked up through the “2015 Creative arts Emmy Awards’ handed out Saturday, Sept. 12. “Game of Thrones,” which earned 24 nominations this year, led the way with eight Emmy wins. “Bessie,” the film about blues singer Bessie Smith, earned four for the premium cable channel.
30Because of a rule change, any series where the episodes run 30 minutes will be considered a comedy. One-hour shows will be in the drama category unless producers can persuade a nine-member panel to see it differently. “The board feels that the rule changes worked and that we had a fair competition where you didn’t have forum shopping. Can rules be looked at again? They will be. I think when you hold a competition on the scale that we do, it’s incumbent upon our organization to look at the rules often,” says Bruce Rosenblum, Television Academy Chairman and CEO. “Initially the Netflix folks were disappointed that ’Orange Is the New Black’ was not eligible as a comedy, our membership clearly recognized the show as an excellent show and nominated it in the drama category. We’re very comfortable with how those rule changes avoided forum shopping and really gave each show the chance to be in the right category.”
37Most Emmy wins by a series, for “Frasier.”
74Most Emmy nominations for an individual is held by Hector Ramirez, including for his work on CBS’ “The Kennedy Center Honor” and “Dancing with the Stars.”
126Total number of Emmy nominations for HBO this year, most of any network.
193Total Emmy nominations for “Saturday Night Live” during its long run on NBC.
20,000 The number of voting members of the Television Academy.