Back in the early 1980s two talented young performers from Ontario first worked together on SCTV — stars-in-the-making John Candy and Martin Short. All those years later, they’re paired together again, this time in the race for Primetime Emmy recognition.
Candy and Short are the focus of separate documentary features with a major shot at nominations for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special. John Candy: I Like Me, directed by Colin Hanks, examines the comedic actor beloved for Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Uncle Buck and many other films.
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“When he was up on the screen, people looked at the screen and it was like, ‘That’s us,’” Hanks says of the Candy appeal. “There was this human connection in which John was a normal human being that suffered all of the same things that we do as individuals.”
As a kid, Hanks met Candy on the set of Splash, the 1984 Ron Howard film that became a breakthrough for Colin’s father Tom Hanks and Candy. “It’s almost a great magic trick. John made everyone feel special,” Hanks recalls. “I remember the way that John made me feel. He made me feel welcome and accepted.”
Marty, Life Is Short, directed by Martin Short buddy and Oscar nominee Lawrence Kasdan, follows the life and career of an actor who, on the strength of Only Murders in the Building, is more popular than ever.
“[Marty] hasn’t changed. That’s the amazing part. It’s like it took 50 years for people to get him,” Kasdan observes. “His audience has gotten bigger. And sometimes I think his reach has been underestimated because he stands next to the brightest media stars in the world… Over time he’s just aged so well. And I love seeing his audience expand.”
Marty, Life Is Short and Prime Video’s John Candy: I Like Me are just two of the myriad celebrity-oriented documentaries with strong Emmy potential. Along with the Short film, Netflix has Being Eddie, about Eddie Murphy; aka Charlie Sheen; Selena y Los Dinos, about the late Tejano singer and her family band, and the documentary series Rafa, about tennis sensation Rafael Nadal. HBO Max fields the two-parter Billy Joel: And So It Goes, directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin; two-parter Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio; My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay, and it streams the celebrity.land Films feature I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not. The latter film, directed by Marina Zenovich, offers an “authorized yet unfiltered” take on the comedy star known, at least at times, for problematic behavior, probing “what is beneath the surface of his superstar bravado.”
Emmy voters, unlike their counterparts in the Motion Picture Academy’s documentary branch, don’t look skeptically at celebrity-themed documentaries. Last year, Matt Wolf’s Pee-wee as Himself, about the late actor Paul Reubens, won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special. Two years ago, Ron Howard’s Jim Henson Idea Man, about the Muppets mastermind, won five Primetime Emmys, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special.
Continuing in the celebrity vein this year, Apple TV advances Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, Ben Stiller’s affectionate look at his famous parents, comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. The streamer also boasts Mr. Scorsese, directed by Rebecca Miller, a five-episode series about the Oscar-winning filmmaker. Martin Scorsese is unquestionably one of the greatest ever to go behind a camera, yet the series reveals dramatic stumbles on his route to the top.
“One of the main themes in this series is reinvention, personal reinvention. And I think anybody can actually identify with that, that sense of like you’re up and then you’re down,” Miller notes. “And in his case, he was really down. He was fired from his first feature film. He kind of got wiped out from drugs. He saved himself from that. Then there were other times in the ’80s where he was written off entirely, went to sort of what they call ‘director’s jail’ for a while. And each time he had to kind of rise from the ashes.”
Not all the celebrity-focused docuseries in Emmy contention are flattering. Sean Combs: The Reckoning explores the pattern of behavior that ultimately led to a federal prison sentence for the titular music mogul and entrepreneur. The series streaming on Netflix is directed by Alex Stapleton and executive produced by Stapleton and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson.
“We had a conversation about joining forces and working on this documentary together. And it was like hours and hours of conversation that were really deep,” Stapleton remembers. “And what I appreciate about 50 is his willingness to investigate the middle and the messiness — that things are not always so black or white, so right or wrong. Where does the line of victim end and the perpetrator begin? These were things that I knew getting involved with this story were going to be themes and necessary to kind of push into. And I really felt like at the time, the media, especially social media, but even legacy media, the coverage [of Combs] was so two-dimensional, and it was really wrapped up in baby oil. But that’s not a story, that’s not a documentary. So, I was always interested in digging further.”
The two-part aka Charlie Sheen, directed by Andrew Renzi, is also a portrait of a star with more baggage than an airline cargo hold.
“I wanted to enter the celebrity doc conversation, [centering on] maybe somebody who’s not so perfect. Charlie came to mind and I was able to get connected to him,” Renzi explains. “We spent about eight months to a year getting to know each other before we shot a frame of the film.”
Renzi didn’t approach the project as hagiography. “I take it very seriously that I’m making something that ultimately creates a legacy piece for somebody,” the director insists. “This is the Charlie Sheen documentary, and there probably can’t be another one… He had no editorial control over this thing, but he’s able to look at it and say, ‘All right, good, bad, all the things, this is an honest portrait of me that I feel like was representative of my POV…’ It’s a nice feeling to be able to walk away and say, ‘OK, he’s good with it, I’m good with it. My hands are clean.’”
Contenders for Emmy recognition extend beyond the celebrity-themed into another very popular genre: true crime. Among the blood-soaked docs are the HBO Max series The Yogurt Shop Murders, directed by Margaret Brown. It’s an investigation of the long-unsolved killing of four young women at a frozen yogurt outlet in Austin, Texas in 1991. About a month after the series premiered last August, police announced they had finally identified the culprit, a deceased serial killer — a dramatic development that spurred HBO Max and Brown to create a special fifth episode, titled “The End of Wondering”.
Brown moved to Austin in the late 1990s, less than a decade after the horrifying murders. “People would talk about the case like this ghost story that happened here except that the ghost story was real,” she says. “People would talk about it at parties late at night. Everyone had a theory. I’m basically the same age as the girls and their siblings, and I have so many friends who were connected to those girls and even some of the boys who were wrongly accused of the crime — one of whom was on death row and one was [sentenced to] life in prison for a time.”
Netflix puts forth the feature documentaries A Deadly American Marriage and Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror, and the three-part American Murder: Gabby Petito, a series about the young woman killed by her fiancé in 2021 in a case that attracted nationwide attention.
From Investigation Discovery comes Lost Women of Alaska, a series narrated and executive-produced by Oscar winner Octavia Spencer. It chronicles the disappearance of several Indigenous women in Alaska, where evidence increasingly pointed toward a serial killer.
“I can’t imagine having a family member disappear and not knowing what happened to them. So, we want to provide closure in some cases, justice in others,” Spencer says. “There’s a number that really stuck out for me, that there were over 1,300 missing Indigenous women [in Alaska]… That’s an alarming number. The very opening line [of the series] is, ‘Alaska is a serial killer’s playground.’”
Even some non-true crime, non-celebrity documentaries are climbing into the Emmy mix (if you can imagine). From executive producer Jordan Peele comes High Horse: The Black Cowboy, a three-part series on Peacock that “reveals the story of the Black cowboy whose history has been stolen, erased and left untold.”
From the PBS series American Masters comes W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause, directed by Rita Coburn, about the towering civil rights activist, historian and sociologist. That doc feature is narrated by Viola Davis, with performances of Du Bois’s words rendered by Jeffrey Wright, Courtney B. Vance, and Common.
In six parts, The American Revolution, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, plunges us into the momentous war that led to the nation’s founding. The PBS series doesn’t censor uncomfortable truths, such as the reality that George Washington and other Founding Fathers owned slaves.
PBS “has urged us, but also permitted us to dive deep, unafraid of conflict,” Burns said last September as he unveiled the first episode of the series in New York. That was a subtle reference to the climate in which the series premiered — coming after President Trump’s attempts to sanitize accounts of American history at the Smithsonian Institution and at National Parks.
The Emmy nominations will be announced July 8, just a few days after the nation celebrates its 250th birthday.
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