The Rewards of the Craft: Emmy Nominees on the Joys & Challenges of Television
We had the pleasure of hosting two panels this year—check out our second panel here— ahead of the 2024 Emmy Awards, which will be held live on ABC on Sunday, September 15, from 8-11 ET. Like last year, we sat down with some nominees from some great, disparate, challenging shows. In our first panel, Planet Earth III composers Jacob Shea and Sara Barone (nominated for episode 6, “Extremes”), editors Varun Viswanath and Patrick Tuck from the critically acclaimed winning series Reservation Dogs, and the documentary Escaping Twin Flames executive producer/co-creator and co-showrunner and editor Inbal B. Lessner and editor Kevin Hibbard.
These projects couldn’t really be more different, yet each had crucial stories to tell and excelled at presenting those stories in challenging, surprising ways. Planet Earth III, narrated and led by the indispensable Richard Attenborough, takes us on another astonishing tour of our ferocious, fragile, impossibly beautiful planet. The Planet Earth series works at a scale that is commensurate with its subject matter. Yet, its joys and astonishment have grown bittersweet, watching as we do with the awareness of the often depressing state of our global response to global warming. For composers Jacob Shea and Sara Barone, matching the scenes of intense beauty with the right music and tone was a challenge in scale, too—the footage was captured over many patient years of observations; these incredible Emmy-nominated composers had far less time to find the perfect note to capture an unforgettable sequence of images. They’re nominated for their work for episode 6, “Extremes,” which reveals the incredible ways that animals survive in the most inhospitable places on the planet, from deep subterranean caves to boiling deserts and frozen mountain summits.
For Sterlin Harjo’s critically acclaimed Reservation Dogs, which tracks four Native American teenagers’ lives as they grow, grow apart, and come back together again on a reservation in Eastern Oklahoma, editors Varun Viswanath and Patrick Tuck earned their Emmy nod for the toughest episode of them all, the series finale. Viswanath and Tuck took on episode 10, “Dig,” which brought every character from the world of Reservation Dogs back together again in one beautiful, bittersweet coda.
The task on hand for Escaping Twin Flames executive producer/co-showrunner/editor Inbal B. Lessner and editor Kevin Hibbard was doubly difficult—not only did they have to do their jobs to craft the tightest, truest possible version of the story of the victims of Jeff and Shaleia Divine, the Twin Flames Universe leaders who prey on people looking for love by promising to match them harmonious, perfectly paired partners, but they were also creating a documentary about a negligent, deceitful practice that’s still ongoing in Michigan. The stakes were incredibly high for Lessner and Hibbard, and their duties weren’t only to create the best possible docu-series but also to honor the victims and paint a vivid, damning portrait of the two people responsible for so much pain and suffering who are still at large.
You can check out the full panel here:
