By Robert Goldrich, The Road To Emmy Series, Part 10

With the second phase of the Emmy Awards season set to get underway with next week’s announcement of the nominations, we will soon see whether Guild Awards recognition and other honors proved to be a harbinger of how TV Academy members ended up voting.

Does a DGA Award win translate into an Emmy nomination?

Does an ASC Award nomination foreshadow an Emmy nom for cinematography?

Do ACE Eddie Award and/or Art Directors Guild (ADG) Excellence in Production Design Award nominations yield Emmy nods in those respective disciplines?

As for other recent honors, does a Peabody Award mean an Emmy nomination will follow?

And what does a Gotham TV Award mean for a show’s Emmy prospects? That’s inherently hard to tell, particularly since this is just the first year of the Gotham TV competition. Whether or not Gotham distinction  makes a difference, suffice it to say that the honor is in and of itself worthwhile.

SHOOT’s “The Road To Emmy” series has thus far included shows and the artists behind them who have garnered these guild, Peabody and Gotham TV honors. For example, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Prime Video) won the Gotham Award for Breakthrough Drama Series. SHOOT’s phase one Emmy coverage connected with Mr. & Mrs. Smith showrunner Francesca Sloane, director/executive producer Hiro Murai and cinematographer Christian Sprenger, ASC. The show broke new ground for varied collaborators, marking Sloane’s first turn as a showrunner, Sprenger’s initial foray into directing, and gaffer Cody Jacobs' debut as an episodic cinematographer. All have a bond that includes their earlier collective contributions to the lauded series Atlanta.

Peabody winner
Garnering a prestigious Peabody Award was Fellow Travelers (Showtime). On the Peabody website, the rationale for the honor is shared. It reads, “Running all through Fellow Travelers, a limited series based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel, is the question of what it costs us–as individuals, as a community, as a country–to make parts of ourselves unknowable, inviolate, invisible. Set against the backdrop of the ‘Lavender Scare’ during the 1950s McCarthy era on one end and the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s at the other, this ambitious period drama is anchored by the decades-spanning affair between Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer) and Timothy Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey). Along with their friends, who include a State Department secretary, an African-American journalist, and a stealth drag performer, the lovers are forced to wrestle with why and whether to keep their relationship–and their very identities–a secret. As Hawk finds pain and solace in the closet with a picture-perfect family and Tim rebukes his faith while thrusting himself into increasingly more radical politics, their love chains them to one another as they see the world and the queer community change around them. For chronicling a half century’s worth of LGBTQ history and anchoring it in a sweeping romance that makes us swoon and blush in equal measure, Fellow Travelers wins a Peabody Award.”

SHOOT turned to Minahan to gain insights into Fellow Travelers. He recalled reading the first two scripts and being immediately “sold” on the series. “I had never been so moved by reading a script before,” he assessed, describing the narrative as “familiar,” “exotic,” “terrifying” and “relevant” all at the same time. Minahan related to the story, having come of age himself in the 1980s as a student in New York. He noted, “It was a really intense time to come of age when suddenly everyone around you started dying.” That was “a hard place to go back to” with people being diagnosed with HIV and dying from AIDS. But Fellow Travelers was such “a great love story” that Minahan was compelled to embark on that trip.

DGA Award winner
Meanwhile our alluded to DGA Award winner this season is Sarah Adina Smith–for the “Her and Him” episode of the limited series Lessons in Chemistry (Apple TV+). Smith directed the first two episodes of Lessons in Chemistry (episode two being “Her and Him”), additionally serving as an executive producer. 

Set in the early 1950s, Lessons in Chemistry–based on Bonnie Garmus’ best-selling 2022 novel of the same title–follows Elizabeth Zott (portrayed by Brie Larson), whose dream of being a scientist is put on hold in a patriarchal society. When Zott suffers a tragic loss only to later be fired from her lab, she accepts a job as a host on a TV cooking show, and sets out to teach a nation of overlooked housewives–and the men who are suddenly listening–a lot more than recipes.

Among the challenges posed by Lessons in Chemistry, said Smith, was her concern that a white woman facing workplace discrimination in the 1950s, while a substantive narrative, could have come off as something done before on film. A priority for her and the cast was to access “something more universal and layered,” being “as human and specific as possible.” Towards that end, Smith realized that she had to do justice to Zott’s story “from the inside out,” providing “a true sense of her inner life.” Thankfully, Smith had the good fortune of having Larson in the role of Zott. “She’s doing most of that work. My job was to cinematically figure out how to support the storytelling.” 

Smith embraced the opportunity to set the tone in the first two episodes–or for that matter in the very first five minutes of the show. Smith explained that she wanted to give the audience “a question they could hang onto” from the get-go, opening with a long  tracking shot of Zott from the back, showing her face for the first time as the star of a TV cooking show. This is juxtaposed with Zott also revealed to be working as a lowly lab tech getting coffee for the male scientists. The stark contrast between those two stations in life leads to curiosity about what happened in-between, the how and why of the way her life evolved, the personal and professional challenges she faced, and beyond that how they reflected what was going on in the world at that time from a big-picture perspective. Again, though, this is all conveyed in that very personal “inner life” context coveted by Smith.

From that “inner life” are lessons to be learned, which Smith felt both personally and professionally. “Ironically the lesson of Lessons in Chemistry is that life surprises you. You think you’re on the path and that your will is pushing through to achieve your destiny built on your own choices,” said Smith. “Suddenly there’s a sharp left turn you couldn’t have predicted. How you react to that surprise is what makes life meaningful.”

ASC Award nominee
Enjoying a meaningful awards season has been Tobias Schliessler, ASC. On the feature film front, Schliessler shot Rustin, which scored Oscar, BAFTA and Critics Choice Award nominations for lead actor Colman Domingo. And for the limited series All the Light We Cannot See (Netflix), Schliessler–in tandem with exec producer Shawn Levy, who directed all the episodes–garnered a coveted Golden Frog nomination at Camerimage. Next Schliessler received his first career ASC Award nomination on the strength of the show’s second episode. These honors and assorted others–including a DGA Award nod for Levy, Producers Guild and Golden Globe Award noms, as well as a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination (for Aria Mia Loberti, Best Breakthrough Performance in a New Scripted Series) have squarely placed All the Light We Cannot See in the Emmy Awards season conversation.

All the Light We Cannot See is based on Anthony Doerr’s fictional novel of the same title, winner of a Pulitzer Prize (adapted for film by writer Steven Knight). The series follows the story of a blind French girl named Marie-Laure (portrayed by Loberti, a first-time performer with limited eyesight in real life), and her father, Daniel LeBlanc (Mark Ruffalo), who flee German-occupied Paris with a legendary diamond to keep it from falling into the hands of the Nazis during World War II. The series explores the worlds of Marie-Laure and Werner (Louis Hofmann), a German soldier, whose paths cross in France. We find that these two characters on opposite sides of the war have a unifying bond–radio broadcasts they listened to as children featuring a professor who inspired them and provided a sort of sanctuary for their hearts and minds during tumultuous times.

ACE Eddie and ADG Award nominees
Our recent ACE Eddie and ADG Excellence in Production Design Award nominees are part of the family of collaborators on Only Murders in the Building (Hulu). Editors Shelly Westerman and Payton Koch, along with production designer Patrick Howe earned their nods on the strength of the season three episode titled “Sitzprobe.”

The editors find creative inspiration in each other and are further buoyed by the dynamics of the show. While the core of the series remains the trio of Charles (portrayed by Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez), they all have room to grow as they take on new murder mysteries, navigate new paths and interact with new characters. On the latter score Meryl Streep (as Loretta) was added to season three as were such new wrinkles as a Broadway musical setting where Charles, Oliver and Mabel had to deal with twists and turns from behind, above and all around the stage in the quest to solve a mystery.

Production designer Howe, who came aboard Only Murders in the Building for season two, said the show has evolved over time, sparked by such season three elements as the introduction of the Broadway musical setting. Howe started in theater design and found it gratifying to return to his original work. His training in the theater dovetailed nicely with the plot development for this past season. From a production design standpoint, there was also the opportunity to renovate Mabel’s apartment at the Arconia, a fictional upper West Side building in New York.  Bringing new looks to Mabel’s residence after two seasons as a crumbling, deteriorating space was a delicious creative proposition for Howe.

This is the 10th installment of SHOOT’s weekly 16-part The Road To Emmy Series of feature stories. Nominations will be announced and covered on July 17. Creative Arts Emmy winners will be reported on September 7 and 8, and primetime Emmy ceremony winners will be covered on September 15.)

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