Emmy Boss on Creative Arts Shake-Up: ‘Not Everyone’s Hunky-Dory’

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Where the Emmys Go Next

A whole bunch of people are about to become Emmy winners this weekend — yes, a full week before the main Emmy Awards telecast on NBC — and the Television Academy is hoping you might actually notice this year.

In a move that felt controversial and sudden but I’m told had been in progress for months, the Academy announced in July that several high-profile categories — including supporting actor and actress in a limited series — had moved to the Labor Day weekend ceremonies usually called the Creative Arts Emmys. 

Except, as Television Academy president Maury McIntyre told me in a recent call, “Creative Arts” isn’t exactly the best way to describe these two awards shows — even if that’s the name they’re sticking with for now. 

“We look at this as weekend one,” says McIntyre, a former Disney marketing executive who took over leadership of the Academy in 2014. “The Creative Arts brand kind of made it sound like that was a different award, but it’s not. Every award we give over the next two weekends is the same Emmy Award.”

Actors have always been sprinkled among the craft and technical Emmy winners at Creative Arts, which includes two nights of ceremonies that aren’t televised live but will air as a combined package on FXX on Sept. 12. The categories for guest actors in both comedy and drama — where Widow’s Bay star Betty Gilpin, Paradise actress Shailene Woodley and Saturday Night Live host Connor Storrie are all nominated this year — have long been part of Creative Arts, adding a bit of glitz to ceremonies that are otherwise largely taken up by categories like period or fantasy/sci-fi makeup (non-prosthetic) or picture editing for variety programming (segment).

By adding in both supporting categories for limited series, where David Harbour, Linda Cardellini, Dakota Fanning and Charles Melton are among the high-profile nominees, the Academy has upped the star quotient a bit more — and attempted to spread out the disappointment of having categories bumped from the main telecast. The writing and directing awards for limited series, as well as writing for a variety series, have also been shifted to the earlier weekend. It’s a move that McIntyre calls an effort to “re-energize the show” — and, transparently, give the TV Academy a better edge as they aim to strike a new broadcast rights deal after the current one expires this year.

From my conversations with publicists over the past few weeks, many of the nominated stars will attend “weekend one,” with all categories for scripted shows announced at the ceremony on Sunday. Storrie will get the chance to show off his controversial new haircut, as I’m told he’s a confirmed attendee. McIntyre tells me all acting nominees will have the chance to pose on a step-and-repeat and visit an expanded media center — a smaller setup than the traditional Emmy telecast red carpet, but enough to give fans all the photos they need. 

The supporting nominees in the limited series race, meanwhile, will be invited to do it all over again the following Monday, as McIntyre tells me that win or lose, they’ll be invited to the main Emmys telecast as guests. “They will actually get both experiences,” he continues. “They can go in front of the media on night two, and they’ll be able to come back the following week to walk the full red carpet for the telecast.” 

McIntyre acknowledges that not “everyone’s hunky-dory” with this shift, and emphasizes it’s a change for this year only: “You’ve got to try something to see how it works, and if it doesn’t work, we’re going to try something else.” Since we’re living in a world where the Oscars are headed to YouTube, my guess is that “something else” will be even more dramatic than a category shift when the Emmys find a new broadcast deal next year. 

Moving categories between ceremonies while overall awards show ratings continue to sink is a little too close to the metaphor of shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, even for me, an eternal awards show optimist confident they will always exist and matter even if general audiences no longer watch. Though there was pushback on the decision to punt the categories from the main telecast — McIntyre, ever diplomatic, has clearly fielded a lot of angry phone calls — there was never enough outcry to force the Emmys to reverse course, as Oscars producers have done multiple times when tweaking their ceremony.

And anyway, the Creative Arts Emmys — or whatever they’ll be called in the future — seem like the actually fun ones. “Night one is a lot more boisterous,” McIntyre says of the ceremony largely dedicated to reality and non-fiction categories. “I think that people are a lot more candid sometimes in their speeches, at both night one and night two. They know that it might be telecast on FXX, but they’re just up there having a good time.”

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Inside the Reptile Underworld

Long before directing the Emmy-nominated Tiger King and Chimp Crazy, Eric Goode spent much of his career not just behind the velvet rope, but in charge of it. As the founder of the era-defining Manhattan nightclub Area and the New York City hotel hotspots The Waverly Inn and The Maritime Hotel, Goode had access to some of the most protected, closed-off people in the world: celebrities. 

At the same time, he tells me, he was also part of an entirely different, equally secretive world: exotic animal enthusiasts and traders. Those people, like Goode, were as captivated by rare reptiles as most people are by celebrity. In the 2000s, Goode, now 68, founded the nonprofit organization the Turtle Conservatory, but continued to be fascinated by the people who operated on the less legal side of the animal trade. 

“Oftentimes these people that keep exotic animals are extremely guarded for good reason,” Goode tells me, noting some might not possess the proper permits, for instance. “So getting into the worlds of these reptile people isn’t always very easy. Meeting celebrities might be easier. I don’t know.”

It’s been 12 years since Goode first picked up a camera to capture that world, traveling to Florida in the company of a then-up-and-coming filmmaker named Josh Safdie to try and film with exotic animal enthusiast and convicted drug trafficker Mario Trabaue. (“Josh and I decided, let’s just ambush him and film him badly undercover with spy glasses, which was so stupid.”) That work eventually became not just Monsters of God, Goode’s five-part HBO documentary series that wraps up this week, but his previous projects Tiger King and Chimp Crazy, all of which place viewers in the middle of this secretive, law-breaking, unbelievable world. 

“What Eric says a lot is that we like to preach to the unconverted,” says Jeremy McBride, Goode’s producing partner on all three projects. “We like to reach a wide audience around these topics through our characters. The animals are sort of proxies for the issues, but the characters are what set these shows apart.”

There’s no single breakout character on Monsters of God like Tiger King’s Joe Exotic, but instead a series of them who enter and exit the story across decades — including several who serve jail time and then jump right back into the world of illegal animal trade, drug smuggling or both. One of the earliest reptile kingpins, Hank Molt, makes for a captivating and slippery interview subject in early episodes and happily messed with the filmmakers behind the scenes, too. “He was just grifting me,” Goode says, recalling how Molt — who started dealing animals in the late 1960s — faked a phone call to get out of one previously scheduled interview. 

Molt’s rivalry with Florida reptile dealer Tom Crutchfield makes up the drama of the first few episodes, but then even more dangerous figures enter the story. There’s “Cocaine Cowboy” Trabaue, plus the father and son smuggling dynasty of Ray and Mike van Nostrand and the elusive Malaysian dealer Anson Wong, who becomes more of the focus in the finale. Goode says that when he first began filming, most participants assumed the footage would never be seen. Ironically, Tiger King’s success on Netflix during the pandemic made his job of snagging interviews harder. 

“Post Tiger King, it became more like, ‘Do I want to be portrayed as some crazy person in the next project that we’re doing?’” Goode remembers. And though the documentary’s participants are now riding high on the thrill of being HBO stars, he knows from experience it might not last.

“There’s this euphoria that then can turn when that high passes after a few months, and then it starts to sink in,” he says. “These people can turn on you, and then things can get really sketchy, which happened with Tiger King. Whether that high will last long with these people, it’s hard to say. But right now we seem to have accomplished that.”

Though Goode is only an incidental figure in Monsters of God, the passion for animals and reptiles that he shares with the subjects is key to the film’s approach, and it explains how people who could make plenty of money legally trading reptiles cannot resist slipping into illegal smuggling.

“It’s an addiction,” says McBride, who only admits to having a slight dose of said addiction “just by being close to Eric all the time.” 

“I think it’s the pathology that goes with the territory,” Goode adds. “I have some of that in myself, by the way. I’m not going to smuggle it across borders, but when I see something I’ve never seen before, a reptile, there’s a kind of high.”