Awards

If viewers were asked to point to the single most popular and influential TV character to emerge last year, it would have to be the Child, more casually referred to as Baby Yoda. The adorable animatronic puppet was introduced to the world in Season 1 of Disney Plus’ “The Mandalorian” and was solidified as a

As 2020 began, nobody could have doubted that the presidential election would be the story of the year when it came to late-night talk shows. The hosts and their teams spent most of 2019 getting into fighting shape for Trump: The Rematch. But a not-so-funny-thing happened on the way to the Oval Office. By late

Giancarlo Esposito can arguably be called the king of peak TV, playing a key role in some of the most critically acclaimed TV of this era. Just this past year, he appeared in Disney Plus’ “The Mandalorian,” Netflix’s “Dear White People,” Cinemax’s “Jett,” Amazon Prime Video’s “The Boys,” Epix’s “Godfather of Harlem” and, of course,

The second season of Netflix’s “You” saw Joe Goldberg, played by Penn Badgley, relocate from New York to Los Angeles. Goldberg wanted to turn over a new leaf after murdering an ex and framing her therapist for the crime, and in doing so, he assumed a different life as a man named Will. But old

As the titular Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) becomes a bigger name in standup comedy within Amazon Prime Video’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the venues she plays get larger and the scope of those scenes, too, continues to grow. Pivotal to making that possible are both co-creator, writer, executive producer and director Amy Sherman-Palladino and

A decade ago Goloka Bolte and her business partner Ethan Peterson founded the Casting Firm, and a little over eight years ago they were brought on to cast “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and its subsequent spinoffs. Since then they have been nominated three times for reality casting Emmys and now Bolte, who also acts as president

“Grace and Frankie” production designer Devorah Herbert recalls times in her career when she would walk into tech scout meetings and be the only woman in the room. She couldn’t say anything about it at then because “if you asked for equality in the workplace, you were seen as someone who was bitchy,” she says.

Liz Tigelaar’s “Little Fires Everywhere” writers’ room was on the Paramount lot, a central point between herself and many of her Eastside writers. But when the show wrapped, she wanted to move her space closer to home in Venice Beach. Her new location, into which she moved in January, is now only blocks from the

The working environment for women directors in television has steadily improved over the years, but while mentorship of the formal and informal variety has helpedto bridge the gap in representation behind the camera, there’s still a ways to go before parity is achieved. Of the more than 4,300 TV episodes produced in the 2018-19 season,

Looking back at some of my favorite new characters from the past year of television, I realized with a burst of pleasant surprise that many of them are, in fact, teenage girls. For as much as TV has been fascinated by them, it has been rarely good at portraying them with anything approaching nuance. On-screen,

When Liz Feldman and her writers’ room were working on the second season of “Dead to Me,” child separation at the border was dominating news headlines. Given that the majority of her room is made up of mothers, the writer and executive producer says such news was “weighing really heavily” and “almost subconsciously one of

When Olivia Colman needs to demonstrate Queen Elizabeth II’s authority on “The Crown,” there’s a lot of pomp and circumstance that producers can turn to, not to mention having her wear the titular headgear. But most female characters in contemporary drama series don’t have a crown handy when they need to project power in business

In 1852 Emily Dickinson published her first poem anonymously. She was still just a teenager, but the reason for keeping her name off the verses ran deeper: In the 1800s, a woman’s place was in the home, with few attending school, let alone pursuing public positions. But Dickinson was determined to “make sure her work

When adapting the story of Madam C.J. Walker, America’s first Black female self-made millionaire, into Netflix’s limited series “Self Made,” co-showrunner Elle Johnson knew that there was one thing the team must get right — the hair. “This was something that myself, the other co-showrunner Janine [Sherman Barrois] and Nicole [Jefferson Asher, series writer] were

Had “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” been pitched in the era it depicts (the 1950s), creator Amy Sherman-Palladino suspects network executives would have loved the idea of a character that, when their marriage falls apart, finds a voice within standup comedy — save for one small detail: “They would say, ‘No one would believe that —

This Emmy season, Angelica Ross made history as the first female transgender performer to be a series regular in two series — FX’s “American Horror Story: 1984” and “Pose.” In the latter, she portrayed Candy Ferocity, a ballroom performer who started her own house but was still struggling to get by. Her story showed the

“Lego Masters” hasn’t yet been renewed for a Season 2, yet Fox Corp. boss Lachlan Murdoch has all but confirmed that it will be back — well, once productions are allowed to come back. The show was broadcast’s top-rated new series among adults 18-49, adults 18-34 and teens last season. And Fox touted that it

One might think that “Last Chance U” and “Cheer” executive producer and director Greg Whiteley’s 2014 documentary experience with Mitt Romney would bond him to Nanette Burstein, who executive produced and directed “Hillary,” a four-part docuseries about Hillary Clinton. It would not be an incorrect assumption, but it would be a limiting one. When Variety

The seeds for “Upload,” the Amazon Prime Video comedy about a young man named Nathan (Robbie Amell) who has his consciousness sent to a digital afterlife, were planted in creator Greg Daniels’ mind three decades ago, when technology was so different that such an idea was truly the stuff of science fiction. But making the

Russell Crowe has spent many hours in the makeup chair over his decades-long acting career, but the process to transform into Roger Ailes for Showtime’s limited series “The Loudest Voice” was unlike any he had experienced before. “The first fitting was almost psychologically scarring,” Crowe says of finding the right prosthetics. “It was near to

Nobody brightens a room on Hulu’s “Shrill” like Lolly Adefope’s Fran. Always in the corner of series lead Annie (Aidy Bryant), Fran helps her navigate boyfriends, her career and her relationship with her micromanaging mother. Fran is confident in her support, but Season 2 allows her own worries to take center-stage, too. In the fifth

The white-hot market for the next entertaining, obsessive, engaging, gasp-inducing docuseries that leads to real-world change is still very much alive and well. In the past six months alone, docuseries including HBO’s “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children,” Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning,” Netflix’s “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez” and ESPN’s

When “Project Runway” premiered on Bravo in 2004, it entered a crowded reality competition landscape but still managed to be the first of its kind as a fashion design competition. Now, more than a decade and a half later, such fashion series are seeing a surge. “Project Runway” alone has launched more than six spinoffs,

Mark Mylod has been one of premium cable’s go-to directors for quite some time, having helmed episodes of Showtime’s “Shameless” and “The Affair,” as well as “Entourage” and “Game of Thrones” at HBO. Now Mylod is one of the key directors on “Succession,” handling episodes such as Season 2’s “Tern Haven” and the season finale

Of all the major Primetime Emmy categories, the competition program field has been the most in need of a shakeup. This is a not-so-amazing race that rarely changes — although this year, ironically, “The Amazing Race” won’t be a part of it. For the first time since the category launched in 2003, “The Amazing Race”

Stepping onto the set of Amazon Prime Video’s “Homecoming” to direct all seven episodes of the second season, Kyle Patrick Alvarez had a big task at hand. The first season had been entirely helmed by executive producer Sam Esmail, who created a very specific visual look for the show, including the use of long, tracking

The Television Academy has finally listened to our pleas — well, sort of. The org recently announced plans to expand the number of comedy and drama Emmy nominations from seven to eight, acknowledging that the volume of eligible programs continues to rise. As a matter of fact, according to the TV Academy, Emmy submissions for

Dahvi Waller says she felt like she was rolling a massive boulder up a hill when she started her research for the FX on Hulu limited series “Mrs. America.” She had to figure out how she was going to tell the politically, racially and socially complex story of the Equal Rights Amendment and the women

Although they are set a century apart, both Netflix limited series “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker” and “Unbelievable” tell years-long true stories of enterprising women in a shorter-form storytelling setting. Susannah Grant, who wrote, produced and directed “Unbelievable,” weaved a complicated, multi-person, multi-jurisdiction narrative that starts with a young woman’s

Though he co-starred in “Avenue 5” in the spring, Zach Woods had already been an HBO mainstay on “Silicon Valley.” There, Woods played Donald “Jared“ Dunn, the uneasy Pied Piper COO with an intense attachment to the company’s founder Richard (Thomas Middleditch) and a horrifying — albeit comically vague — history. In the fourth episode