If it feels like there’s been an uptick of celebrity-centric documentary projects nominated for Emmys in recent years — specifically, in the categories of best documentary/nonfiction special (one- or two-part projects) and best documentary/nonfiction series (projects of more than two parts) — it’s because there has been. Not long ago, it was rare to have more than one celebrity-focused nominee in either category. This year, four of the five nominated doc specials are about celebs — Prime Video’s John Candy: I Like Me, Netflix’s Marty,Life Is Short, HBO Max’s Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! and HBO’s My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay. And the same is true of three of the five doc series nominees — Apple TV’s Mr. Scorsese and Netflix’s Rafa and Sean Combs: The Reckoning.
For most of TV history, nonfiction projects were funded by government grants and aired on free public broadcasting, so they tended to center on “serious” subject matter. In the 1980s, PBS ventured into celebrity territory with American Masters, Susan Lacy’s doc series comprising feature-length profiles of cultural artists, which proved popular with viewers and Emmy voters. At about the same time, nascent cable networks required edgy programming to lure people to pay for TV. Finding and funding such content became the specialty of Sheila Nevins, HBO’s docs chief at the time, who not infrequently used celebrities as a vehicle to explore larger social issues in doc specials — for example, 1998’s Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth was really about the First Amendment — and wound up with more Emmys for producing than anyone else in history.
