TV Throws Down the Gauntlet, Again

THE NIGHT OF September 17 was a cracked bellwether in the world of entertainment. The Emmy Awards, the television industry’s homage to its movers and shakers (and by extension itself) stepped off at the Microsoft Theater in Hollywood, and marked what would become a night of historic firsts, firing broadsides on the complacency of the Emmys' own past:

Donald Glover won Emmy Awards for lead actor in a comedy series and directing for a comedy series, both for his work in FX’s Atlanta. He became the first African American director to win for directing a comedy series, and only the second to win best actor in a comedy series, after Robert Guillaume, the immortal Benson, in 1985.

Sterling K. Brown made history, becoming the first African American to win best actor in a drama at the Emmys in 19 years, for his performance in NBC’s This Is Us.

Riz Ahmed, won the Emmy for Best Actor in a limited dramatic series for his role in HBO’s riveting The Night Of, becoming the first Muslim and the first South Asian actor to be so honored. ...

For the Emmys as an institution, and a community trying not to become an “institution” (with all the word's hidebound associations), it was a very good night. The 2017 Emmy recipients’ list reflected an understanding of how minorities figure as position players in every step of the televisual process, from writing to directing to acting. Thus, the Emmys threw down one gauntlet of implicit challenge to the Academy Awards (“let’s see you top this next year!”) — and then threw another one, with the medium of television itself.

The demographic triumphs of this year’s Emmy winners add to the growing cultural and technological evidence that, as a medium in a refreshing, wrenching transition, television has fully achieved primacy in the national media diet, as much or more an immediate identifier and signifier of American popular culture than the movies were for the previous 30 years. ...

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Image credits: Sterling K. Brown: © 2017 CBS/Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Geeks logo: © 2017 Jerrick Media LLC.