Most Emmy hosts walk out on the night with nothing at stake. Mariska Hargitay walks out on Monday having already won twice. At the Creative Arts ceremonies held on 5 and 6 September at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, she took Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Documentary or Nonfiction Program, both for My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay, according to TVLine’s full list of Creative Arts winners. Eight days later she returns to the same building to host the 78th Emmy Awards.
The scheduling is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. The Creative Arts weekend and the main telecast are the same awards, split across two events for reasons of running time. A host who wins in the first half is not receiving a courtesy nod from the producers; she is being judged by the same voters, in the same season, for work she made herself.
Two Wins in the Weekend Before the Main Show
The Creative Arts ceremonies are where the majority of Emmy categories are actually decided. Spread across two nights, they cover directing, writing, casting, cinematography, sound, production design, guest performances and the documentary categories, and they produce the tallies that newspapers report as a network or platform “leading” the year. The condensed broadcast of both nights airs on FXX on 12 September.
The two awards Mariska Hargitay took came in the nonfiction categories, one for the film and one for her own direction of it. The second is the more pointed of the pair. Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special can be read as a vote for a subject; a directing award is a vote for the person holding the camera and making the choices about what the audience sees and in what order.
She was not the only performer to take something home that weekend. Ernest Harden Jr. won Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for The Pitt, Betty Gilpin won Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for Widow’s Bay, and Shailene Woodley won Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for Paradise. Rob Reiner won Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for The Bear. In the variety categories the Apple Music Super Bowl LX halftime show starring Bad Bunny won seven awards, including Outstanding Variety Special (Live), directing, choreography, music direction, lighting design, technical direction and camerawork, and sound mixing.
The Film Took Almost Sixty Years to Arrive
My Mom Jayne is Hargitay’s feature directorial debut and the first time she has publicly taken on the story of her mother, the actress Jayne Mansfield. Warner Bros. Discovery’s press office described it as arriving “almost sixty years after the Hollywood legend’s tragic death” when it announced the film for HBO, in a media release published by the WBD pressroom.
The facts underneath the film are stark. Hargitay was three years old when Mansfield died in a car accident at the age of 34. The documentary follows her attempt to know a mother she cannot remember, built from interviews with people who were close to Mansfield and from photographs and home movies that had not been shown publicly before. It is a first-person film in the most literal sense: the director is also the person who has the least direct memory of the subject.
Hargitay is not new to the form, only to directing it. She and Trish Adlesic produced I Am Evidence, an HBO documentary about untested rape kits that also won an Emmy. That earlier film sat alongside her advocacy work rather than her acting career, and it is the more useful precedent for what she has now done twice over.
What the Host Actually Walks Into
The 78th Emmy Awards air on Monday 14 September at 8 p.m. ET and 5 p.m. PT, live on NBC and streaming on Peacock, from the Peacock Theater at L.A. Live. NBC’s own preview of the ceremony confirms Jesse Collins Entertainment is producing, with Jesse Collins, Dionne Harmon and Jeannae Rouzan-Clay as executive producers, and notes that the show lands in the year of the network’s centenary. NBC has carried the Emmys 25 times before; this is the 26th.
Hargitay was announced as host on 7 July. ABC News reports that she becomes the first woman to host the Emmy Awards solo in fifteen years, and that she is a previous winner in her own right, taking Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2006 for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Twenty years separate that award from the two she has just collected for directing, which is a longer gap than most careers in television get to record.
The Nominations Behind the Telecast
The field she is introducing is led by The Pitt, the HBO Max medical drama, with 25 nominations including Outstanding Drama Series and a lead actor nomination for Noah Wyle. Hacks follows with 24 for its fifth and final season, which ABC News notes is a record for the most nominations a comedy series has taken in a single year. Widow’s Bay has 19, Pluribus has 18 and Beef has 16.
There are 28 first-time performer nominees this year, a figure that says more about the state of television than any single winner will. The academy has also introduced a Legacy Award, and named I Love Lucy as its first recipient, a piece of programming from the same era in which Jayne Mansfield became famous. That is either a coincidence or the kind of thing a host writes an opening around.
Nominations were read on 8 July by Jeff Hiller and Liza Colón-Zayas, and the Creative Arts results have already redistributed some of the pressure. A show that arrives at the main telecast having lost its craft categories is rarely the show that leaves with the top prize.
Why a Working Director Hosting Is Different
Award-show hosting has drifted toward stand-up in recent years, on the reasonable theory that a comedian can carry three hours of live television and absorb a bad joke. Mariska Hargitay is not that. She is a lead actress of long standing who made a film about her own family, and who now has directing credentials the room can verify.
That changes the register available to her. A host who has just been given an award for nonfiction directing can talk about the work in the room as work, rather than as a series of set-ups. The risk runs the other way too: a host with something invested in the categories is harder to read as neutral, and every joke about a nominee arrives from someone who was in the same voting pool a week earlier.
There is also the simple matter of stamina. She is hosting a three-hour live broadcast in the same venue where she accepted two awards eight days earlier, while still leading Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Whatever else Monday night produces, the schedule alone is a piece of information about how the modern awards calendar works.
What to Watch for on the Night
Three things are worth tracking. The first is whether The Pitt converts its nomination lead into Outstanding Drama Series, which is the only result that will be remembered a year from now. The second is whether Hacks closes its final season with the comedy prize, having already set the nominations record. The third is how Hargitay handles the obvious: she is the host, a nominee’s peer, and a winner, and the monologue has to acknowledge all three without labouring any of them.
Beyond that, the Creative Arts results have already given the night some shape. Mr. Scorsese took Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, South Park took Outstanding Animated Program, Jeopardy! took Outstanding Game Show with Ken Jennings hosting, and Jimmy Kimmel won Outstanding Host for a Game Show for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The Late Show With Stephen Colbert took Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. Those are settled; the drama, comedy and limited-series races are not.
What makes the Hargitay story hold up is that it is not really an awards story. It is a story about a person who spent sixty years not knowing something about her own family, made a film to find out, and then had to go back to the same theatre and be funny about television. MW3.News has covered that collision between personal work and public performance before, in a conversation with Davion Gowie about time, money and faith. The specifics differ. The problem does not.
The 78th Emmy Awards air on NBC and Peacock on Monday 14 September at 8 p.m. ET.
