Todd Leavitt was President of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences from 2002-2005. He is now a managing partner at film financing and television-packaging boutique Tulip Media. Here, exclusively for TheWrap, he outlines a dozen key facts about what just happened and what it may mean for the Academy.
ONE
The Emmy broadcast is just and only "that" -- a three-hour television program. Its importance (which absolutely needs to be distinguished from the awards process itself) is to present to a hopefully-adoring public whose attention span rarely endures for three hours, and in the most entertaining fashion possible, the epitome of excellence from the prior broadcast, cablecast and (modestly and recently) digital season.
TWO
The broadcast's primary benefit is actually to the Television Academy in the form of the generous license fees paid by the four participating broadcast networks for transmission rights to the program. The license fee primarily goes to support Academy programs (more below). The networks will only pay a generous license fee if they receive value.
Broadcast networks measure "value" primarily by eyeballs. It is a tremendous amount of heavy lifting to put together a single, three-hour, once-a-year special relative to the financial results (results enjoyed by any given network only once every four years).
Oscars and the Super Bowl merit a lot of heavy lifting, given the eyeballs they successfully attract. The Emmys, not so much. That is, for so much energy and money for only a once per year phenomena and only once every four years, life can become much too short much too quickly if the broadcaster does not perceive it has received value.
THREE
Audiences come to any awards broadcast for a few specific reasons: to enjoy "celebrity" (which can arguably be satisfied by red carpet appearances); to express an "Idolistic" rooting interest (gee, I love "Lost" and hope it's recognized this year --assuming it has even been nominated (which is entirely different issue and dialogue); and to occasionally be entertained in any number of different ways (viz. Jack Palance Oscar push-ups of long ago, or Ms. Streisand's Emmy rendition of "You'll Never Walk Alone" after 9/11).
FOUR
The Academy years ago agreed, and the networks historically acceded to be bound, to the condition that all actor, director and writer award categories for major prime time genres would appear "live" in the broadcast presentation as a quid pro quo for the Academy to be freed from having to pay "clip fees" of somewhere around $400,000 (today's cost) to the four primary collective bargaining units which work on TV shows (AFTRA, SAG, DGA, WGA).
The clips are necessary to "sell" every show and performance nominated, in context in the broadcast.
FIVE
The waiver provisions long-predate the emergence of "reality" as an important, audience enthusing genre. Over the years, reality categories have appropriately been added to the Awards program generally (most recently including a separate award for reality hosts), and it is safe to say this is a very positive evolutionary step in the eyes of networks and audiences (albeit not necessarily WGA members).
