PBS Leads News, Doc Emmy Nominations

NEW YORK: PBS dominated the 30th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations with a total of 41, followed by CBS with 23, ABC and HBO/Cinemax with 13 each, National Geographic with 12 and NBC with ten.

CNN picked up eight nominations, with 4 for Discovery Channel and 3 each for BBC America and Travel Channel. The winners will be announced September 21 at a ceremony in New York that will also present a lifetime achievement award to Barbara Walters. The CNN Documentary Unit, meanwhile, will receive the President’s Award for its commitment to long-form docs. The most nominated program this year is CBS’s 60 Minutes with a total of 15 nods.

The nominees for best documentary are Cinemax’s Nanking, HBO’s Taxi to the Dark Side, National Geographic’s Gorilla Murders and The Devil Came on Horseback and PBS’s P.O.V.: Inheritance.

Nominees for outstanding investigative journalism—long form include PBS’s Frontline: Rules of Engagement, P.O.V. The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez and Illicit: The Dark Trade; HBO’s Taxi to the Dark Side and National Geographic’s Gorilla Murders. For informational programming, the nominees include PBS’s Frontline: Growing Up Online, Independent Lens: Hard Road Home, P.O.V.: In the Family and NOVA: A Walk to Beautiful; and HBO’s Resolved and The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.

For historical programming, the contenders are Cinemax’s Nanking, PBS’s Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI, P.O.V.: The Judge and the General and The Rape of Europa; Discovery Channel’s Koppel on Discovery: The Last Lynching and MSNBC’s Witness to Jonestown.

CBS’s 60 Minutes‘ special on Alec Baldwin secured a nod for arts and cultural programming, alongside ABC’s 20/20’s Drama High, Cinemax’s Salim Baba, HBO’s The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not For Sale and PBS’s In The Footsteps of Marco Polo and P.O.V.: Belarusian Waltz.

In the science, technology and nature programming category, History Channel secured a nod for Evolve: Eyes, while National Geographic Channel picked up a nomination for Five Years on Mars. PBS’s NOVA nabbed the other two nominations for Ape Genius and Secrets of the Parthenon.