As we head into Emmy week and celebrate this season’s bounty of top-notch televised entertainment, can we put to bed the fallacy that Hollywood has somehow run out of ideas?
Even a cursory glance at the comedy, drama and limited/anthology series races proves that it’s just not true. The lion’s share of every category features nominees that are based on original ideas — not existing intellectual property.
In drama, the sensation that is HBO Max’s “The Pitt” carries plenty of DNA from TV’s best medical series — but it is an original idea created by R. Scott Gemmill, complete with unique beats and modern takes on the disastrous U.S. healthcare system.
Among the other drama nominees, Hulu’s “Paradise” is a post-apocalyptic storyline concocted by Dan Fogelman; Jonathan Tropper came up with the concept for his Apple TV series “Your Friends and Neighbors” (he’s on a roll, having also created Apple’s “Lucky”); Debora Cahn was the mind behind the idea for Netflix’s “The Diplomat”; only Vince Gilligan could conceive something so unique as Apple TV’s “Pluribus”; and Julian Fellowes, who knows a thing or two about historic eras thanks to projects like “Downton Abbey,” came up with HBO Max’s “The Gilded Age.”
