The Hollywood Reporter Award Special 17B, June 6, 2022

When I was first writing the pilot for Severance, I was working at a company that makes doors. It was a very mindless job: cataloging all the different parts of doors. There’s nothing terribly unique or interesting in saying that I didn’t like my job — even people who are doing something they love might find themselves on a day-to-day basis feeling like whatever they’re doing is just a grind. But my job became so mind-numbing that I had the fantasy that would become the premise of the show. What if I could skip the eight hours of the workday, to disassociate and just get it over with? I joke that the Great Resignation — the phenomenon in which 47 million Americans quit their jobs in 2021 alone — was my…

AMERICAN AUTO NBC’s workplace comedy skewers the C-suite of a Detroit-based automotive company, particularly the new CEO (Ana Gasteyer), who was poached from a Big Pharma company and knows nothing about cars. HACKS When it’s not following Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance on tour, the HBO Max comedy depicts the ongoing conflict between talent agent Jimmy (co-creator Paul W. Downs) and his insubordinate assistant, Kayla (Megan Stalter). SUPER PUMPED Showtime’s anthology drama is another series set within the stylishly sleek Silicon Valley tech scene, with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) going head-to-head with board members for control of the company. THE DROPOUT The Hulu limited series charts the rise and fall of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried). The tech entrepreneur’s leadership insecurities are often on display in the company’s Silicon Valley office space. THE MORNING SHOW More toxic…

Playing Tina Turner was an “unbelievably difficult, exciting and exhilarating” experience, says Adrienne Warren, who was in the midst of a Broadway run in the starring role of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical when everything came to a halt in March 2020. “Our entire community was in deep mourning,” Warren recalls, not knowing when or if they’d be back onstage. Amid the uncertainty of that summer came the opportunity to portray Mamie Till-Mobley in the ABC anthology series Women of the Movement. Mamie, an educator and activist, was the mother of Emmett Till, whose lynching in 1955 was a catalyst in the civil rights movement. When the project came to Warren with her name on the shortlist, outrage over anti-Black racism was again roiling the country after the murder of George…

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company That Addicted America By Beth Macy Hulu’s limited series is based on Macy’s examination of the opioid crisis, which covered broad ground to depict how OxyContin and its producer, Purdue Pharma, destroyed the lives of those who were prescribed the highly addictive painkiller. Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement By Devery S. Anderson The basis of the first season of ABC’s Women of the Movement is this account of the 1955 lynching of the 14-year-old boy and the perpetrators who were acquitted by an all-white jury in Mississippi. Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive By Stephanie Land Land’s memoir about her experience as a single mother who began cleaning houses to make ends meet was…

BEST ACTOR, DRAMA SERIES Jamie Dornan The Tourist For his portrayal of an amnesiac, the actor — coming off a career-changing turn in Kenneth Branagh’s best picture Oscar nominee Belfast — could earn his first Emmy nomination. It looked like he’d have to compete in the wildly competitive limited series category, but as the BBC has renewed the ratings hit, he now winds up in this slightly more open race. Adam Scott Severance Despite years of strong TV work, most notably on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, Scott has never received an Emmy nom. However, it increasingly looks like that may change as voters catch up with his understated work on Apple TV+’s futuristic critics’ darling (it’s at 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), in which he stars alongside Patricia Arquette, John Turturro and Britt Lower. Lee…

Sam Waterston is one of the most respected and beloved actors of our time. Described by The New York Times as the “thinking man’s surrogate” and by the Los Angeles Times as “a pure actor — versatile, dedicated, intelligent and very good indeed, at home in any medium and any period,” he has done outstanding work over seven decades onstage and onscreen, accumulating a Tony nomination, an Oscar nomination and eight Emmy nominations, one of which resulted in a win. But he is best known for one role in particular: Jack McCoy, the New York assistant district attorney turned district attorney on NBC’s drama series Law & Order, a role he played from 1994 through 2010, and one that he returned to playing this year — in addition to playing…