John Landgraf says that there’s still “magic” in the television business as evidenced by the likes of actors such as The Bear’s Liza Colón-Zay
John Landgraf says that there’s still “magic” in the television business as evidenced by the likes of actors such as The Bear’s Liza Colón-Zayas beating Carol Burnett and Meryl Streep to win her first Emmy or Shōgun winning major awards.
It was a fantastic night for both FX and The Walt Disney Company, which broke a range of records at this year’s Emmys.
FX won 36 awards across Primetime Emmys and the Creative Arts Awards – its best ever total – and Disney took home 60 awards, beating previous records set by CBS and Netflix.
Shōgun snapped up the Outstanding Drama Series win and stars Anna Sawai and Hiroyuki Sanada took home the top drama acting awards, while The Bear scored wins for Jeremy Allen White, Liza Colón-Zayas, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as well as Chris Storer for directing and Fargo’s Lamorne Morris beat the likes of Robert Downey Jr. and Jonathan Bailey in Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.
Landgraf spoke with Deadline about the wins, and also shared updates on the future of Shōgun, which is currently prepping for its second season, The Bear, which will have its fourth season ready for next June, as well as some new projects in the works.
DEADLINE: How are you feeling about last night’s achievements?
LANDGRAF: Just great, especially with the breadth and depth of the nominations and the wins across so many different crafts and so many different genres. I think we counted up 297 people that were associated with the 93 nominations. You think about those 300 people and the quality of the work they did and what the recognition made meant to them. Then, for me, seeing people win for the first time or win unexpectedly is always so thrilling like Hiro Sanada winning or whether I thought Liza Colón-Zayas had a chance of winning that award against Carol Burnett and Meryl Streep or whether Lamorne Morris would be the only one to win an Emmy for Fargo Season 5. That’s thrilling when you see those things. It’s just really exciting because these are immensely talented people, and I loved seeing them get their moment in the sun.
DEADLINE: Do you believe these awards are important?
LANDGRAF: I’ve been doing this for 35 years and as far as I know, I have no control over what gets nominated or doesn’t and what wins or doesn’t. The only influence we have here is who we work with, how we work with them, how well we support them, challenge them, resource them. Obviously we work very hard on marketing and publicity and everything we need to do to distribute the show and get it seen and get the story of the show and the people that made it out there. But really what you have any influence over at all is the work itself, right? Frankly, that’s what you spend your time doing. You don’t spend your time in these jobs at awards shows and collecting and polishing awards, you spend all of your time thinking about creative people and working with creative people and trying to figure out the best way to support creative people. That’s the day to day work and it’s wildly satisfying, though, when you see the people recognized for the quality of what they’ve done, that’s the thrilling part.
DEADLINE: Going into awards you’d already broken records but we’ve spent the last 10 years toggling between HBO and Netflix so the number of awards must have been incredibly satisfying.
LANDGRAF: It was satisfying just because FX has been working very hard to foster excellence in television for 22 years. There’s a lot that we’ve made in that time or supported that I feel, really very, very proud of. For me, there’s also the sense that everyone who’s worked on this brand, on this studio, on these shows, all the way back to Michael Chiklis and Ryan Murphy on Nip/Tuck and the Always Sunny In Philadelphia guys, who were the first thing that FX Productions made, or Rescue Me with Peter Tolan and Denis Leary. All of us at the company, sort of have a stake in what it’s taken.
It was extra sweet for me that it happened within the context of The Walt Disney Company absolutely shattering the all-time record, right? In 78 years of Emmys, and the all-time record, which was a tie, was 44 and The Walt Disney Company won 60. Once any kind of competitive event has been held for 78 years, typically, if you if an entity breaks the record, they don’t break it by 35. If you think about what percentage of all the eligible programming CBS made in 1974, I don’t think it’s that different than what Disney made. It’s worthy of debate, but I think it’s a fair comparison. From my standpoint, I believe in the idea of a company that has organized itself through brands that all contribute to a streaming service, in this case, it’s Hulu and Disney+ which are increasingly unified. I mean Amazon has a comedy group and a movie group and a genre movie group and a drama group and Netflix has a prestige drama group, that’s how they organize themselves. I personally like the way Disney has organized itself. It had to acquire a number of entities like FX and 20th Century television and 20th Century Film and National Geographic to get there but I like the way it’s organized itself because I just think that that human-scaled brands or entities that nevertheless have some level of authority and autonomy over what they do, it’s not that surprising to me that it yielded this result because I think it’s a better way to achieve the volume that streaming demands.
DEADLINE: Moving on to The Bear, that show broke its own Emmys record. Many of us expected Jeremy Allen White to win, but how do you feel when someone like Liza Colón-Zayas, who wasn’t a favorite, wins?
LANDGRAF: It’s the best. I love Liza. I just think she’s extraordinary. I can, at once, think that Carol Burnett is one of the greatest comedians in the history of the medium or that Meryl Streep is the greatest actor of her generation and simultaneously believe that there are absolutely brilliant artists who have never had the opportunity to show America, and television audiences what they can do, in a position where they’re able to get seen and able to get their flowers. That’s thrilling to me. Liza has been around, she’s been acting for a long, long time. I think one of my favorite things of all about this business is really just seeing people show you what they can do in a way that we didn’t know, that’s surprising. All of these actors on Shōgun were surprising because I’d never seen anyone but Hiro do anything even remotely comparable, and I’ve never seen Hiro at the center of a massive, epic television show. That’s the thing I love the most, that’s where I think there’s still magic in this business.
DEADLINE: Given the number of wins, you can’t be too disappointed that The Bear didn’t win the top comedy prize, right?
LANDGRAF: No. I think the Emmys are always unpredictable. They always have been, and they always will be. What would you have said if out of that cast on Fargo – Jon Hamm, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Juno Temple etc – that only Lamorne Morris would win? That’s what makes it interesting, you never know for sure.
DEADLINE: Is there any suggestion that the conversation around The Bear not really being a comedy prevented that win?
LANDGRAF: I don’t know, I really don’t. I’ve been in this a long time, and I can’t tell you. I’ve never audited
AUTHOR: The World Screen
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