The Peabody Awards on Monday began unveiling its winners honoring the most compelling and empowering stories in broadcasting and streaming media in 2020, with Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso and CBS’ The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on the list.
A total of 30 awards, handed out annually via at Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, will be revealed daily this week through Thursday in virtual presentations.
There were 60 nominees this year, the Peabodys’ 81st, selected by 19 jurors who considered 1,300 entries across TV, podcasts/radio and the web in entertainment, news, documentary, arts, children’s/youth, public service and multimedia programming.
Last week, the Peabodys gave Ava DuVernay’s Array its Institutional Award, Sam Pollard the Peabody Career Achievement Award, and PBS and CNN anchor Judy Woodruff the Peabody Award for Journalistic Integrity.
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Keep checking back as we update the winners list, which is below with Peabody jurors’ comments. You can watch the winners’ acceptance speeches here.
ENTERTAINMENT
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS)
CBS Studios
With filming restrictions in place, Stephen Colbert decided to move production of his CBS Late Show to his home outside of Charleston, a remarkably successful transformation of the late-night television model by a host inviting us into his home, rather than his typical comforting presence in our living rooms and bedrooms. Amidst suffering in a global pandemic, a public fed up with police violence against African Americans, and a morally contemptuous president fighting for his political life, Colbert’s kindness, gentle spirit, and deeply felt ethical nature provided a nightly salve the nation desperately needed.
Ted Lasso (Apple TV+)
Apple/Doozer Productions in association with Warner Bros Television and Universal Television
What this presumably Ugly American, fish-out-of-water tale offers us is a charming dose of radical optimism, with an equally endearing Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso. It turns out that more than simply a sports coach, Ted is remarkably good at honest communication with others, affecting change by being a deeply good human, one with his own quiet anxieties and pain. The Apple TV+ series is the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity, both on-screen and off, in a moment when the nation truly needs inspiring models of kindness.
DOCUMENTARY
Asian Americans (PBS)
CAAM, WETA, Flash Cuts LLC, Tajima-Peña Productions, ITVS
Renee Tajima-Peña’s five-part documentary series places Asian communities at the center of debates about belonging and citizenship in America. The series asks us to consider who gets to be at the center of these American stories, offering the requisite national, ethnic, religious, political, linguistic, and cultural diversity that make up Asian American communities across the country today. In turn, we move beyond a singular representative testimony and bear witness to varying, complex, and touching portraits of individuals, identities, enclaves, and movements, collectively born in the face of tragedy and in spite of the burdens of trauma.
Time (Amazon Studios)
Concordia Studio, GB Feature LLC and Amazon Studios
This remarkable story of love and the impact of incarceration on a family is detailed through the multiple, often elusive registers of time—slow time, long time, happy time, missed time, hopeful time, and arrested time. In this brilliantly conceived, beautifully realized, and brutally honest chronicle, we travel with Fox Rich and her family toward her husband’s release and their collective freedom. Carefully building and then mining the archive of family memories, home movies, prison visits, high school and college graduations, filmmaker Garrett Bradley proffers viewers the power of dreams and the struggle to shape and sustain love and life across the divides of incarceration.
PODCAST/RADIO
Floodlines (The Atlantic)
This captivating podcast is a comprehensive story of Hurricane Katrina and its social, cultural, psychological, political, economic, and environmental aftermath and impact. From the national media’s ready-made criminalization of Black residents and their worthiness to be rescued, to the insensitive early response of national government officials, Floodlines also asks us to consider what happens to place, home, relationships, and community when politics, incompetence, and indifference are at the core of how we regard each other.
NEWS
“Full Disclosure” (KNXV-TV)
ABC15 Arizona
Digging into Arizona’s “Brady list,” a system designed to track police officers with histories of lying and committing crimes in hopes of keeping police accountable, this hour-long special from ABC15 Arizona offers a stark portrait not only of why the system is broken, but why it has never been fixed. The yearlong investigation, with exhaustive reporting and damning video footage, demonstrates how law enforcement agencies rarely adhere to their own legal standards in keeping and disseminating such misconduct reports.
“China Undercover” (PBS/GBH)
Frontline
This documentary uncovers the story of China’s arresting an estimated two million Uyghur Muslims and putting them in concentration camps—what experts says is the largest mass incarceration of an ethnic group since the Holocaust. But the report also makes the case that this is a massive experiment in developing the most complete surveillance state in history, as the government employs technologies such as advanced algorithmic facial recognition software and houses marked with digital barcodes to monitor and ultimately detain Muslims whose behavior is “predicted” as threatening.
CHILDREN’S & YOUTH
The Owl House (Disney Channel)
Disney Television Animation
Alice in Wonderland. Dorothy in Oz. Coraline in Other World. To that list we should now add: Luz in Boiling Isles. Luz crosses a mysterious threshold and finds herself in a magical, colorful land where she finds both the strength and the support group she needs to become who she’s meant to be. The Dana Terrace-created animated series builds a wildly inventive other world that makes room for everyone and gives queer kids a welcome template alongside which to explore their own budding creative energies.