Saturday, August 24, 2019

Inside Emmy Season’s Trickiest Double Act

Less than a week remains for TV Academy members to get in their final 2019 Emmy votes, which makes this the perfect time to catch up on Vanity Fair’s wealth of special Emmys issue content. First on the list: Julie Miller’s eye-opening deep dive into the making of FX’s Fosse/Verdon,a tricky pas de deux that blends jazzy theater with clear-eyed reckoning about the entertainment industry’s sexual politics and what sorts of creative achievements our culture is primed to recognize. As Nicole Fosse,daughter of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon—the directorial dynamo and celebrated performer whose unique, complicated marriage forms the backbone of the series—told Miller, “What I have come to believe personally—and I think this is what Time’s Up and #MeToo is really all about—is, if we are in a world, a society, even an internal personal world, or family system of secrets, we’re not well. We’re always hiding something, and there will always be shame. There’s a really profound importance to telling the truth.”
Elsewhere in our special issue, Yohana Desta breaks down the sets from four of this season’s most engrossing series, while Richard Lawson wonders which shows might step into the awards spotlight after Game of Thrones and Veep take their final bows. Meanwhile, the writer-director of Sundance darling Brittany Runs a Marathon opens up about the true story that inspired his feel-good comedy, while the Little Gold Men team chats with the head of AMC Networks and discusses Joan Didion’s spy novel The Last Thing He Wanted, soon to be a movie by Dee Rees starring Anne Hathaway and Ben Affleck.