The first batch of Peabody Award winners announced today (6/6) includes "Dopesick," "Reservation Dogs," "Mr. SOUL!" and "So They Know We Existed." Peabody recipients will be revealed throughout the week, as selected by the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors. This year’s 30 winners represent the most compelling and empowering stories in broadcasting and digital media from 2021.
Here’s a rundown of the winners unveiled today spanning the Entertainment, Documentary, Podcast/Radio and News categories.
Entertainment:
“Dopesick”
"Dopesick" brings to life the ongoing opioid epidemic in the United States, courtesy of the now-infamous Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, the company responsible for the drug OxyContin. The Michael Keaton-starring limited series is truly a gut punch, forcing us to see, constantly and unwaveringly, how the choices the Sackler family and its company made directly led to the destruction of countless lives and families.
Hulu, Danny Strong Productions, John Goldwyn Productions, The Littlefield Company, 20th Television (Hulu)
“Reservation Dogs”
"Reservation Dogs" follows the scrappy adventures of four indigenous youth—Elora, Bear, Cheese and Willie—as they drift through life in Oklahoma. Co-creators Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo, citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, offer a long-overdue show that takes seriously the hopes, dreams, and electricity of its youthful native protagonists while tackling fatherless households, addiction, discrimination, and grief with aplomb. The series brims with surrealist imagination and deadpan humor that vividly captures a sense of defiant joy in the face of withering dislocation.
FX Productions (FX)
Documentary:
“High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America”
Building on the research of food historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris, "High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America" charts the evolution of Black foodways with both clarity and awe. Taking viewers across the Atlantic from Benin to South Carolina and up the eastern coast of the United States, High on the Hog serves as a corrective to histories that have excluded Black people’s contributions from this country’s culinary records. A One Story Up Production and Pilgrim Media Group for Netflix (Netflix)
“Mr. SOUL!”
A joyful tribute to the local television program "SOUL!" and its creator, the impresario Ellis Haizlip, the documentary film "Mr. SOUL!" is a loving celebration of Black creative achievement and vitality in late twentieth-century America, capturing the majesty, confidence, and revolutionary force of Black artists, intellectuals, writers, and performers. The time between 1968 and 1972 was an extraordinary period in American broadcast television and cultural history, and Haizlip’s "SOUL!" was uncompromisingly and unapologetically Black, serving as a visual and sonic record of Black Americans at their most radical. Shoes In The Bed Productions, ITVS, Black Public Media (BPM), WNET (PBS)
Podcast/Radio:
“Throughline: ‘Afghanistan: The Center of the World’”
Throughline’s magisterial three-part miniseries on Afghanistan offers the long view of a country that Americans often treat as a threat, afterthought, or tragedy, particularly after the chaotic withdrawal of the U.S. military in 2021. By centering the country in its own story and pulling back the frame to consider Afghanistan as a full “civilization,” the team restores a necessary sense of scale to what is often lost in our understanding of the region across the decades and centuries of countless western media reports. Throughline (NPR)
News:
“Transnational”
Vice’s series "Transnational" spotlights the stories of various trans communities around the world: from the ballroom scene in Detroit to a government-sponsored safe haven in Mexico City, with stops in the United Kingdom and Indonesia along the way. In grouping them together and cutting across them—building, as it were, a trans-national collective—Vice’s team pushes back against notions of the global trans community as being any kind of monolith, honoring collectivity in individuality, the many in the few. VICE News (VICE News Tonight)
“‘So They Know We Existed’: Palestinians Film War in Gaza”
In just a heart-wrenching 14 minutes, “So They Know We Existed” captures the devastation to daily civilian life during the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in May 2021 in Gaza. Citizen cell phone footage from the attacks and interviews after the fact document a harrowing portrait of life amid warfare, from a 10-year-old girl to teenage sisters; a young man who lost his father; a musician who lost his livelihood to an explosion, among others. The piece presents a range of civilian Palestinian perspectives and bears witness to the resilience of those who continue to survive the trauma of war long after ceasefire. The New York Times (The New York Times)
“Politically Charged”
ABC15 Arizona’s reports on the arrests of street protesters and the very questionable tactics used against them by local police is a compelling series that warns us of the present-day erosion of our civil liberties. The investigation found that, in 2020, Phoenix police and county prosecutors routinely exaggerated and lied to grand juries to obtain felony charges against protesters. As a direct result of this series, 39 felony protest cases were dismissed, high-level officials resigned, the police chief was suspended, dozens of officers and prosecutors were reassigned, and the Department of Justice opened a sweeping pattern-of-practice investigation.
ABC15 Arizona
