Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, the massively acclaimed and long-running HBO program that received greatest discuss present at every of the final 4 Critics Choice Awards ceremonies, has been pulled from Critics Choice consideration this cycle. The information comes after the group behind the present, the Critics Choice Association, tried to reclassify it as a comedy sequence, The Hollywood Reporter has discovered.
Critics Choice nominations are decided by CCA nominating committees, and the CCA’s TV nominating committee not too long ago determined that solely reveals that “contain dialog” ought to henceforth be eligible for one of the best discuss present honor. Apparently, this was born out of a want to maintain Critics Choice classes in keeping with Emmy classes.
It’s true that the TV Academy, in 2023, break up into two its greatest selection discuss sequence class, which Last Week Tonight had received yearly since 2016 (to the annoyance of parents related to different discuss reveals). The ensuing classes had been greatest discuss sequence and greatest scripted selection sequence. The former included reveals like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! during which “a good portion of the working time consists of unscripted interviews or panel discussions,” even when in addition they embody “scripted parts and different points of a range sequence similar to monologues, musical performances, and many others.” Meanwhile, the latter went to reveals like Last Week Tonight and NBC’s Saturday Night Live which can be “primarily scripted or function loosely scripted improv and include discrete scenes, musical numbers, monologues, comedy stand-ups, sketches, and many others.,” even when they “often function unscripted parts.”
However, the CCA copied solely half of what the TV Academy did. It narrowed the type of applications that may very well be eligible for its greatest discuss present prize, but it surely didn’t create a brand new class for the reveals that not met that definition (ostensibly as a result of it couldn’t create a brand new class after the submission deadline), leaving reveals like Last Week Tonight in one thing of a no man’s land.
People related to Last Week Tonight are annoyed that the change in eligibility necessities was by no means put in writing or shared with them previous to the submission deadline and that the one resolution they had been supplied upon being informed that the present was not eligible for greatest discuss present was to enter it for consideration within the class of greatest comedy sequence. For that award, it might be competing with scripted applications similar to FX’s The Bear, ABC’s Abbott Elementary and HBO’s personal Hacks. Instead, they elected to withdraw Last Week Tonight from Critics Choice consideration altogether.
Both HBO and the CCA declined to remark for this piece, however I’m listening to that the CCA management acknowledges the awkwardness of this example and will likely be re-evaluating its classes forward of the subsequent awards cycle.
