The 75th annual Peabody Awards’ entertainment category recipients were announced today, and among the winners are Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series Master of None, Jill Soloway’s Amazon series Transparent, and ABC’s Black-ish. In addition to the entertainment winners, David Letterman and Jon Stewart will receive special awards to recognize their contributions to late night, TV, politics, and beyond. Here’s the full rundown:
black-ish (ABC) ABC Studios A bright, boisterous, big-hearted comedy about an affluent African American family working overtime to keep it real, black-ish doesn’t let jokes get in the way of insights about race, class, guns, and other hot-button topics that most popular entertainment shows scarcely mention. Master of None (Netflix) Universal TV, Oh Brudder Productions, Alan Yang Productions, Fermulon By turns profound and mundane, ridiculous and deadly serious, this imaginative, shape-shifting comedy chronicles the misadventures of Dev (series creator Aziz Ansari), a 30-year-old Indian-American who’s still trying to figure out what to do with his life. To say it resonates with young-adult viewers is an understatement. Transparent (Amazon Video) Amazon Studios Jeffrey Tambor’s transsexual Maura is not just the lead character of this bold, honest dramedy, she’s the catalyst for her typically dysfunctional modern family’s ongoing reevaluation of itself. Its broadened scope and lively sense of self-awareness, along with irreverent wit and poignant moments, made Transparent‘s second season even stronger than the first. With a gap-toothed grin and a mind full of mischief, David Letterman sauntered onto the late-night TV landscape in 1982, ripped it up and remodeled it in the image we see now on every network and in every late-night host. Letterman’s irreverence, his outlandish gags and his prickly personality all resonated with wary, post-modern viewers. But if he was a brat in the hilarious early years, he literally grew up on the air, maturing into a late-night statesman as comfortable with a sincere commentary as a stupid pet trick. He came to us an enfant terrible, he retired a legend. For decades there had been programs on television that spoofed newsmakers and current events, but The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was something different, transformative. In an era of politicized, echo-chamber news channels and traditional-journalism timidity, Stewart and a cohort of talented farceurs, several of whom have also become household names, didn’t just make jokes about news, they became a crucial source of news for citizens united in their disappointment and disgust with politics and cable news. While The Daily Show is a program that existed before and after Jon Stewart’s tenure, there is little doubt that Stewart and his team, over the course of 17 years, made a lasting impact on political satire, television comedy and even politics itself.
The Peabody Awards are set to air on Pivot Monday, June 6th at 8:00pm.