Peabody ceremony are on May 19 at a luncheon at the Waldorf=Astoria in New York City
Athens, GA – A record 46 recipients of the University of Georgia’s 73rd Annual Peabody Awards were announced today on CBS This Morning and www.peabodyawards.com. The winners, chosen by the Peabody board from almost 1,100 entries, comprise the best in electronic media for the year 2013. The Peabody Awards are considered among the most prestigious and selective prizes in electronic media.
The Peabody awards recognize excellence and meritorious work by radio and television stations, networks, webcasters, producing organizations and individuals. The 16-member Peabody Board is a distinguished panel of television critics, industry professionals and experts in culture and the arts.
This year’s Peabody recipients include a pair of high-profile political melodramas, Netflix’s corrosive House of Cards and ABC’s juicy Scandal; A Chef’s Life, a stereotype-cracking nonfiction serial about a farm-to-fork North Carolina restaurant; Burka Avenger, an animated Pakistani series aimed at empowering girls; A Needed Response, a YouTube viral video created by two University of Oregon students that succinctly criticizes rape culture and champions r-e-s-p-e-c-t for women; and two distinctive probes of the dangers of brain injury in professional football, FRONTLINE’s League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis and ESPN’s Outside the Lines: NFL at a Crossroads: Investigating a Health Crisis.
Other entertainment series honored included AMC’s Breaking Bad, which earned a second Peabody for its riveting final season; Netflix’s complex, character-driven prison drama Orange Is the New Black; Comedy Central’s racially shrewd sketch showcase Key & Peele; F/X’sThe Bridge, an intense, cross-cultural crime drama set on and around the border between Texas and Mexico; and two distinctly different BBC America offerings: the naturalistic mystery Broadchurch and the wildly fanciful Orphan Black, a bioethical thriller about clones.
“The unprecedented number of awards we gave this year reflects this fact. There simply are a larger number of stories that deserve our attention as citizens and consumers,” said Dr. Jeffrey P. Jones, director of the Peabody Awards. “And what a wonderfully rich and satisfying set of stories we’ve called attention to this year!”
Web-based winners included Hollow (www.hollowdocumentary.com), an imaginative, interactive site devoted to a struggling county in rural West Virginia, and A Short History of the Highrise (www.nytimes.com), a clever, highly visual tour of “vertical living.”
Issues of race and ethnicity were explored in several impressive recipients: The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Latino Americans, both shown on PBS, traced the history and the ongoing influence of peoples whose presence here predates the forming of the United States. Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five, also on PBS, revisited a infamous New York rape case that wrongly sent five black and Latino teenagers to prison. National Public Radio reporter Michele Norris’ The Race Card Project used six-word summations of listeners’ thoughts about race as the basis of remarkably telling feature reports.
The rich array of documentary winners included HBO’s tender Life According to Sam, the story of a teenager dealing with an accelerated aging disease, and the cable network’s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, an frank report about a Catholic priest who abused more than 200 students at a Milwaukee school for the deaf.
Other documentary winners included The Law in These Parts, a POV film exploring the alternative legal system Israel developed for governing its occupied Palestinian territories, and three Independent Lens productions: How to Survive a Plague chronicled the crucial role AIDS activists and organizations like ACT UP played in saving lives and hobbling the epidemic. The House I Live In took stock of what we have to show for our 40-year “war” on drugs, and The Invisible War assessed the shameful problem of rape in the U.S. military and why it persists.
A complete list of winners is now available at www.peabodyawards.com .
A complete list of winners is now available at www.peabodyawards.com .
The Peabody statuettes will be formally presented on May 19 at a luncheon ceremony at the Waldorf=Astoria in New York City. Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life, which now boasts five Peabodys, will be the emcee. For information and reservations, contact Sandy Friedman at sandyfriedman@skfevents.com.
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