Emmy voters are faced with quite the Sophie’s Choice when it comes to this year’s outstanding documentary or nonfiction special nominees.
Look at the embarrassment of riches when it comes to celebrity profiles: You’ve got two legendary Canadian comedians and “SCTV” pals facing off with “John Candy, I Like Me” and “Marty, Life Is Short,” the latter all about Martin Short. There’s Mariska Hargitay’s profile of her mother, “My Mom Jayne.” And then you’ve got two centenarians who are still working: “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!” (Brooks actually turned 100 this summer) and “Ocean With David Attenborough,” from the legendary natural history broadcaster, who turned 100 in May.
Of those entries, only “Ocean” centers on a subject that isn’t about a celebrity. Perhaps it’s time to rename this category to “outstanding celebrity documentary” — for, although docs come in all sorts of forms, that is clearly what Primetime Emmy voters are gravitating toward. Since 2022, winners in the field have all been biographies of some sort (“George Carlin’s American Dream,” “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” “Jim Henson: Idea Man” and “Pee-wee as Himself.”
At least it gives a little more framework to an often confusing structure for documentary Emmys. Although the L.A.-based Television Academy and New York-based National Academy of TV Arts & Sciences have done a good job in recent years creating guardrails on who should honor, say, game shows or children’s programming, the land of the doc is still all over the map.
