Inside the Emmys’ First-Ever Nominees Festival |
The final sprint of Emmy campaigning got a real shot of adrenaline this past weekend with the inaugural Televerse, a days-long festival overseen by the Television Academy that allowed each of the major nominated programs to showcase their talent before audiences (hopefully) full of voters. As I quickly gleaned at Saturday morning’s electric panel of The Pitt, though, fans in the general public could also buy tickets and juice the buzz inside the ballroom.
I’m David Canfield, and allow me to put some emphasis on ballroom there: Let’s just say Televerse could not quite compete with the other awards-season festivals, which take movie stars around the world for some of the year’s most glamorous red-carpet showcases. Televerse took place inside of the JMW Marriott in Downtown Los Angeles—an extension of the Emmys’ partnership with the larger entertainment complex LA Live—and felt, unavoidably, like a bit of a Comic-Con-esque convention, with panelists and publicists shuffling through mazes of freight elevators, kitchen shortcuts, and long hotel hallways to make their closing arguments (final Emmy voting just got started and runs into next week).
Who got the big bump, perhaps? The Pitt, as mentioned, featured the liveliest crowd of the events I attended, and has the added benefit of being in production on season two while the Academy votes on season one. I recently also visited the set of the HBO Max medical-drama phenomenon, speaking with the actors who are happily back at work while taking in the extraordinary success—and attention—of their freshman run. “Last season, I came in with about a month’s notice, moved to America for the first time, had no idea what was going on,” said one of the show’s younger stars, Shabana Azeez. “So this time, people looked familiar. Maybe they looked prettier to me because I loved them already.”
HBO saved its fullest starpower for its own Emmys’ celebration event on Sunday, bringing out the likes of The Last of Us’s Pedro Pascal and The White Lotus’s Mike White for their first campaign appearances since their respective nominations. Otherwise, though, Televerse hosted a wild collision of Hollywood talent. I saw The Studio’s Bryan Cranston chatting up the greenroom’s barista while, just behind him, The Last of Us’s Kaitlyn Dever arrived for her show’s panel. The Pitt’s cast exited an elevator following their showcase as Quinta Brunson and the Abbott Elementary team awaited theirs.
Whether any of this moved the needle remains to be seen. But nominees showed up, and so did voters. The Emmys just might have found themselves a new tradition. |
